Tuesday, 2 August 2005
Doing His Best To Sound Gay »
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The past is indeed a more innocent country, where children’s comics could say The gay desperado! He’s comin’ in through the back door, Amigos!! without anyone crying “Sauce!” This may be the best comix site ever.
Via Julian Sanchez.
These 47 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:08pm GMT Permanent link.
The Mouse That Roars »
Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. I mean, Coool. (The downside is this: I bought Gordy a catnip mouse, but he still prefers biting the lead of the one on the desk. It can’t be the name, can it? Still, it’s survived his teeth so far. Maybe a replacement will be just as robust.)
Via the unstoppable Farber.
These 61 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:48pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 3 August 2005
Mark This »
Here’s a lovely fisking of Mark Steyn by Tim Lambert. (Yes, I know it’s possible that Steyn somehow has the right account; but if he’s going to gainsay the US Immigration Service and the 9/11 Commission, he really has to leave his desk and do some research, and produce credible explanations for the lacunae in his version, such as why would Mohammed Atta enter the US without a visa then leave, then re-enter with one? why didn’t Johnelle Bryant record anything about her “meetings” with Atta?)
Anyway, Tim links to another fisking of Steyn, this time by an admirer, Rogier van Bakel. I’m impressed enough by Rogier’s honesty and logic that I’m adding him to the sidebar. That he’s critical of trigger-happy cops, and wary of police searches (quoting the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution), and bent on thwarting ID cards doesn’t hurt.
These 144 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:23pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 5 August 2005
How Sad Is This? »
Scotsman: Cities enterprising with claim Star Trek’s Scotty was native son. (No, I don’t think it makes sense either.)
The fictional nature of Scotland’s intergalactic ambassador appears to be of no concern to civic leaders in least four towns and cities who currently claim “Scotty” as one of their own.
Just two weeks after the death of Canadian actor James Doohan who played the Enterprise engineer, Linlithgow, Elgin and Edinburgh have all put themselves forward as the character’s birthplace.
Aberdeen has now joined the fray over the man forever associated with the phrase “beam me up Scotty”.
…
The bid from Elgin in Morayshire is based on an interview in the 1970s in which Doohan himself said that Scotty came from “Elgin, near Aberdeen”. Elgin councillor Alastair Bisset said he was considering putting up a plaque to mark the city’s Star Trek connection: “I’m looking into this as obviously it would be a great tourism boost for Elgin. If James said his character was born in Elgin then that adds weight to our case.
“I’ve visited Linlithgow, and Elgin is far more attractive.”
However, in Linlithgow, the first Scottish town to announce plans to erect a memorial to Scotty, council leader Willie Dunn said he was “confident” that Scotty was born there.
“I do not understand where the Elgin claim comes from. We did a lot of research into this. His parents are from Linlithgow and continue to live here (after he leaves home) and he was born here.
“He did move to Aberdeen later, before he joined the Enterprise, so I can understand where the confusion is there, but our research clearly tells us his birthplace is Linlithgow.
The indefatigable Gary Farber says, “I canna take more, Captain.” But there is one sensible thing in the whole piece.
The original TV notes from the series say the engineer was born in the capital and the popular website www.scifi.com also lists “Edinburgh, Earth” as his birthplace.
Lesley Hinds, Edinburgh’s Lord Provost, said she would not be surprised to learn that Scotty hailed from the capital. “All the best people come from Edinburgh. …”
But of course.
These 42 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:45am GMT Permanent link.
Racial Profiling »
Others have written on racial profiling better than I can (against: John Band; pro: Chris Dillow).
There are some interesting theories about Timothy McVeigh on Wikipedia.
Some investigators contend that Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols had ties to Islamic terrorism through Ramzi Youssef, the Al Qaeda operative who planned the 1993 WTC Bombing, and through a series of meetings with Islamic terror group Abu-Sayyaf members in the Philippines.
And
McVeigh’s first trial attorney, Stephen Jones, also suggested in his book on the case that Terry Nichols had crossed paths with suspected Islamic-oriented terrorists during his frequent visits to the Philippines before the attacks. Nichol’s father-in-law at the time was a Philippine police officer who owned an apartment building often rented to Arabic students with alleged terrorist connections.
The purpose of racial profiling seems to be to find potential bombers. I don’t think officers looking for young men of Muslim appearance would stop a Timothy McVeigh.
The Oklahoma bomb killed 167 people.
These 62 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:16pm GMT Permanent link.
Out Of Reach »
This is sweet and touching and impressive. Via Gary (and why not leave a comment next time you visit? that goes for me too).
It’s also a colossal waste of money for non-science, non-exploration and a dull dull dull big brother in space — no sex, but perhaps they’re all going to die … There I said it.
Really, I love this stuff. I haven’t posted on the shuffle trip (it’s not really a voyage: it’s not going anywhere; nor is it really a mission, as it’s not doing much) because it’s just so embarrassing. Maybe manned space missions just aren’t feasible. Maybe they are and China or India or Japan will get it right before I croak. But NASA and ESA are doing nothing worth doing — this is just an expensive vanity project, like Richard Branson’s balloon antics, but with brave and smart people risking their lives rather than Richard Branson.
Unmanned space flight gives us satellite navigation, accurate weather forecasts, exploration of other worlds, and real science on the beginning of the solar system. We’ve come a long way since Sputnik, but not so far from Yuri Gargarin.
Mars is not “within reach” and probably never will be.
These 201 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:03pm GMT Permanent link.
Yet More Good Blogs »
I like a blog with an actual theme. None of this rambling in an “oh god I haven’t posted for four hours, everyone will think I’m dead” sort of way. But a strict aesthetic, I like one even more that sticks to it. And, er, I can’t think of one in the sidebar that actually does. So I present (or, more honestly, link to) The Comics Curmudgeon which is really addictive even though I don’t know what he’s talking about most of the time. (Via The Panda’s Thumb.)
Somehow, having read a lot of back entries I found Medium Large which is an utterly splendid comic on the splendidly named Drink at Work.com (the blog is excellent too: this is a sickeningly funny post).
These are two of the best; they’ll probably bugger up the page layout, but it’s worth it.
These 143 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:33pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 7 August 2005
Britblogs »
Some splendid stuff in Tim’s latest Britblog selection. OK, I nominated four of ‘em, but I’ll leave you to guess which four.
These 22 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:46pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 8 August 2005
Another Time-wasting Quiz »
I’ve forgotten where I found this one, but it’s long and I don’t understand most of the biblical worldview reasoning test. Not do I understand the distinction between “Socialist Worldview Thinker” and “Communist/Marxist/Socialist/Secular Humanist Worldview Thinker.”
Your score is: -70 points of 170 possible, -41%
Under 0 gets you in the “Communist …” category. I’d have been lower but I only when I got bored did I start going for “no opinion” which carries -2 instead of -1. Well that, and I knew the answers to “The Bible states that money is the root of all evil” and “There is a Bible verse that states that God helps those that help themselves.”
I just don’t know where they’re going with statements like “The more a government resembles a pure democracy the more disorder and confusion occur.”
I don’t recommend taking it, but if you do, you don’t need to give a valid email address; they’ll only send spam to it anyway.
These 153 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:56am GMT Permanent link.
Robin Cook »
Really not a lot to say about his death beyond echoing Roy Hattersley, “it is impossible to mourn Robin’s death without feeling, almost as the primary emotion, despair at what the Labour party and the country has lost” and to remember that he had been a backbencher for the past two years, and had almost no hope of making it back into the cabinet.
Andrew Rawnsley called him an Acerbic master of the dispatch box ; Michael White praised his quick brain, sharp wit and ability to think outside the box; and his biographer, John Kampfner, says he did more than anyone to restore faith in politicians.
The Telegraph gushed also. Former colleague Gerald Kaufman remembered the genial statesman with a lethal sting:
One fellow-member of the Shadow Cabinet asked the rhetorical question: “What is a conspiracy in the Labour Party?” Answer: “Robin Cook on his own.”
His Telegraph obituary is somewhat stinting, save for this.
Cook had a fine mind, and knew it, and his breadth of knowledge made him dangerous to tangle with, as Margaret Thatcher discovered. When a backbench sycophant compared her with Ulysses, she responded: “Ulysses, you will remember, resisted the siren voices and came safely home to harbour.” Cook rose and, with a deadly smile, recalled that Ulysses was shipwrecked with the loss of all other hands, making landfall on Ithaca alone to find his castle taken and his wife Penelope surrounded by his enemies.
The leader writer is more generous to the parliamentarian who punched above his weight.
Part of Mr Cook’s strength was his command at the Dispatch Box. He was an assured front-bench performer, which is a different thing from simply being an orator (although eloquence is a necessary component). He had a fine, forensic mind, a natural feel for the mood of the Commons and, critically, an ability to ask the right questions. As shadow health secretary and, later, as Labour’s spokesman over the arms-to-Iraq affair, he eviscerated his Tory opposite numbers, fulfilling to the letter the proper role of an Opposition spokesman, namely to hold the Executive to account.
I’m getting a little tired of the word “forensic” but that earns a “Bravo” from me.
Rachel Sylvester thinks that Any hope of Labour returning to the Left died with Robin Cook and quotes the former leader of the Labour Party.
“There are few politicians who are irreplaceable,” Lord Kinnock said yesterday. “Robin Cook was irreplaceable.” It is said that all political careers end in failure. Certainly, Robin Cook’s views have been defeated in government. However, as an opposition politician — whether to the Conservatives or to his own party — he was a success.
Update: I forgot to include the best way to remember him: Cook’s resignation speech.
These 188 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:11pm GMT Permanent link.
In Other News: Iraq Has A Way To Go To Becoming A Democracy »
Guardian: Iraqi minister incensed by airport display bans alcohol.
The Iraqi transport minister has issued an order banning alcohol at Baghdad International Airport after apparently becoming incensed at the bottles of drink and women’s perfume on the shelves of the duty free shop.
Hold on, can he do that?
The ban, forbidding the sale, consumption or advertising of alcohol, was issued by minister Salam al Maliki and comes amid escalating concerns among secular and non-Muslim Iraqis about the creeping Islamisation of the country under the Shia-dominated government.
’Amid’ should be banned by all good subeditors unless writing about the navy. ‘Amidships’ means something, ‘amid’ here means nothing.
An airport official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “He told the head of the airport, Emad Dawood, to remove the bottles and if he didn’t, then he would personally come back and smash them all.”
Now if Iraq had gone down the decadent democratic path, Mr Dawood would have called the TV stations and had him filmed, then pressed charges for criminal damage.
The minister reportedly justified his ban by saying that Iraq was an Islamic country and that “it would give a bad and wrong first impression to visitors”.
It’s a war zone. Who does he thinks going to come apart from journalists? And they’ll be in for a shock now.
The alcohol row comes as conservative Shia Islamists on the committee writing the country’s new constitution are trying to have the country renamed the Federal Islamic Republic of Iraq.
This will go down really well with the Little Green Fascistos.
Elsewhere, Eric Umansky quotes Larry Diamond’s recent book Squandered Victory.
I found it bizarre, disturbing, and politically unwise for the United States to be asking the emerging Iraqi democracy to accept a lower threshold for treaty ratification than the Founders of the United States had deemed appropriate. I was appalled, and at the same time amused, to see—not only for the first time—the Iraqis taking the democratic side of a constitutional argument with the United States.
It seems the U.S. wants permanent military bases, but lack local support.
Even if the U.S. could have beat down Iraqi opposition and gotten Iraqi negotiators to agree that treaty ratification only needed a simply majority, that wouldn’t have achieved much: Sunnis don’t exactly seem inclined to voting for permanent bases. Nor do Shiites. So getting a majority of (temporary!) Iraqi legislators to agree to permanent bases would have only been likely in Cheney’s dreams.
Maybe that’s why though U.S. negotiators’ strong-arming eventually won out and there is only a simple majority required for treaty ratification, no treaty has been offered. The U.S. simply doesn’t have the votes.
Via Explananda.
Remember that post?
Christopher Hitchens said to Ghassan Atiyyah: “If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power.” And of course he was right. We didn’t invade Iraq so we could midwife the birth of yet another despicable tyranny. “One man, one vote, one time” isn’t anything remotely like a democracy.
In order to save democracy, it will be necessary to destroy it.
These 135 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 9 August 2005
Quick Change Of Plan »
Being RSS, it’s in reverse chronological order.
These 8 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:06pm GMT Permanent link.
You Hydrocephalic Little Arse-tart »
No I’ve never what might be accomplished by someone with eighty billion dollars and ready access to Google Maps. Via Gary who thinks it’s all about a death ray. I was thinking of Santa. Eighty Billion? That’s a lot. For writing books?
These 42 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:23pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 10 August 2005
A Curious Book »
I was going to call this “The Gay Protocols” but that would be going a little far — for now. Gary Farber says, Yes, I so believe this is “a ‘bible’ of the homosexual movement." ‘This’ being this.
The piece Gary linked to is by “Marshall K. Kirk and Erastes Pill.” I googled them. Try it yourself. A coda at the bottom of the page suggests that a book called “After the Ball” followed by “Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen.” I googled them too.
Still, they did manage to write a book of that name which is for sale on Amazon. Funny that the “Customers who bought this book also bought “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today” by Alan Sears, “Outrage: How Gay Activists and Liberal Judges Are Trashing Democracy to Redefine Marriage” by Peter Sprigg, “Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth” by Jeffrey Satinover, “The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values” by Tammy Bruce, “Homosexuality: The Use of Scientific Research in the Church’s Moral Debate” by Stanton L. Jones, and “Marriage Under Fire: Why We Must Win This Battle” by James Dobson. All big sellers with the Friends of Dorothy round here.
Someone’s written a faux manual for gays, had it published, and then reviewed it on Amazon under aliases and then sent it round all the conservative family organisations in the US. Is this possible? It looks like it to me. If so, that someone should be outed.
These 253 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 11 August 2005
David Blunkett, Fantasist »
Science Fiction writers on the all-British shortlist for the Hugo best novel award (won by Susanna Clarke) queued up to pay homage to the former Home Secretary earlier this week. “I’m known for writing imaginative straight novels like The Wasp Factory and the ‘Culture’ SF stories,” gushed Fife-based author Iain M Banks, “but I’m only a beginner compared to David Blunkett.” If he gave up politics and went into sci-fi, we’d all have to retire.”
Mr Blunkett told the press that he was “jointly running the government while Tony Blair is on holiday.”
The PMS said
David Blunkett was the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. The Deputy Prime Minister was fulfilling his usual role, which he had performed since 1997, of being in charge whilst the Prime Minister was away. While he was in charge, clearly he spoke to his Cabinet colleagues. This weekend he had spoken to four or five of them, some of whom were on holiday. Asked if David Blunkett’s role was consultative, the PMS said that the Deputy Prime Minister spoke to his colleagues regularly, he had spoken to Jack Straw, Ian McCartney amongst others over the weekend and he would continue to do so. Put to her that David Blunkett seemed to be suggesting that he had a special overseeing role, the PMS underlined that the Deputy Prime Minister was in charge while the Prime Minister was on holiday. Asked if David Blunkett was among those the Deputy Prime Minister spoke to on the weekend, the PMS said no. Asked if therefore the Deputy Prime Minister might be having a word with David Blunkett in light of his comments, the PMS said that that was a matter for the Deputy Prime Minister. Asked of David Blunkett had been attending COBRA meetings, the PMS said not to her knowledge.
Meanwhile, a man walked into a bar. “Ow!” he said. It was an iron bar. David Blunkett had a similar collision with reality. Concessions in bid to ease licensing row.
After criticism from police and judicial groups, David Blunkett has said the government is prepared to rethink proposals to relax drinking laws.
I bet my peanuts to a candy bar (as Eddie Cochran would have it) that when Kimberley Fortier was going into labour last December, Dave slapped his head, and cried, “I knew I should have worn a condom!”
David, you’re a bit late.
These 192 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:07pm GMT Permanent link.
All Time Stupid Moves Department »
Someone said yesterday that Omar Bakri would be unlikely to succeed in applying for asylum from Lebanon as he decided to go there on holiday, so it seems he didn’t fear being tortured there any more than I fear being shot by the Metropolitan Police. (Which is a bit, since you ask, but not enough to stop me going to London.)
It seems this was a mistake: Muslim cleric Bakri arrested in Lebanon.
A security source said Bakri was detained as he made his way to a television station for an interview. No reason has been given for the arrest.
I shouldn’t find the actions of the Lebanese police amusing, but I’m afraid in this case I do. Maybe he won’t have that heart op after all. And if he dies in custody, they’ve a ready-made excuse. Should have gone to Benidorm, mate.
These 116 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:47pm GMT Permanent link.
When Good Papers Print Rubbish »
I like the Telegraph, even though I don’t agree with its editorial line (which often steers a wobbly course between the Blimpishly bonkers and barmy blithering), but the arts and sports coverage are perhaps the best in the British dead tree industry and the reporting is written to higher standards of even-handedness and grammar than its rivals. Even though I find the comment pages hard to swallow, I don’t think they’re out to get me. Christopher Booker in the Sunday, though, has always been a bit of a nutcase. And, for once, I detect a conspiracy in his notebook. (Yes I know it’s five days late; who has time for the Sundays?) It’s not just that his argument is embarrassing.
Despite the best efforts of Dr Steven Meyer, an American scientist who was the lone voice arguing for “intelligent design”, the BBC trio tried to present it as no more than a cause for religious nutters, an “upgrade” of creationism. Sir David Attenborough clearly had not the slightest idea of what the “intelligent design” thesis is about.
And neither has Mr Booker — or any of the ID proponents. It’s an intellectual vacuum, a non-thesis, had it ever breathed it would have departed this life and joined the choir invisible, etc. What is the ID thesis? What does it predict?
Twenty years ago, in his series Life On Earth, Sir David himself sought to demonstrate the miracle of Darwinian natural selection by showing how an earthbound shrew evolved into a bat, by growing membranes on its feet which developed into wings. But this was the worst possible example for him to pick. From the moment that membrane began to develop, until it became a proper wing, the creature would have been markedly less fitted to survive rather than more.
I suspect Mr Booker is remembering Sir David’s television presentation because this isn’t “the worst possible example for him to pick.” The next sentence is an attempt to refute something no one claims. This is the ‘what good is half an eye?’ argument, and the answer is ‘better than none.’ The phrase ‘the moment that membrane began to develop’ supposes a telelogical purpose, as if the creature with a small membrane was an adolescent, and only partly grown. This is rubbish. We don’t need to know why the membrane developed at all; only that it gave some advantage to the creatures which had it which their cousins without lacked.
It is fascinating to see how the Darwinians have now put themselves in the same position as the Christian creationists they so despise. They rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions, fanatically intolerant of anyone who dares question their beliefs.
Except they don’t “rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions.”
Mr Booker looks like a conspirator to me because ID loons are popping up everywhere. Shot down by (among others) John Cole; Julian Sanchez; Brad DeLong; Talk Politics.
Next time Mr Booker might try reading David Attenborough or at least try 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution and Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution.
Albert Einstein once said, “If the Third World War is fought with nuclear weapons, the Fourth will be fought with bows and arrows.” Who needs nuclear weapons? I suppose Mr Booker can take comfort that there was no European Union in the Stone Age.
These 384 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:38pm GMT Permanent link.
Heh And Yet Indeed Or Even The Other Way Round »
Fred “Slacktivist” Clark on Cesspool duty or cleaning up the forums at the newspaper he works for.
Got an infestation of Angry White Guys with unlimited free time who managed to bully away most everyone else and turn the thing into a Know Nothing rally conducted by the AA farm team for Little Green Footballs.
Oh and if you think Charles Johnson is a conservative, well Roger L Simon doesn’t know you from Adam. And what could be farther from the truth? (I mean, dear God, he’s a writer? So is Jeffrey Archer …)
These 56 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 12 August 2005
Who Guards The Guardian? »
This really annoys me. Perhaps not you, so perhaps I’m just being cranky. But WTF? Guardian: Girls now wear the trousers in the playground. I mean there’s an image. Do they take them off in the classroom? Someone really should tell Guardian subeds that “playground” is not a synonym for “school.” (Just as “the Valleys” != Wales. Wales is not an area mostly enclosed by hills, unless the sea counts as a hill. Which it doesn’t.) A witty headline tells the story, even adds to it. This is stupid wordplay which is wrong in every respect. (Compare the BBC, unafraid to be dull: ’Most schoolgirls’ wear trousers.)
I know Guardian-bashing is the lazy blogger’s friend. They put so much stuff online, that some of it must be rubbish. I usually admire Bobbie Johnson — I link to his personal blog (as opposed the Guardian blog) Blast! in the sidebar. But he’s a better writer on his own than he is for his employer. The Guardian profile of Tim Berners-Lee contains this rubbish.
Sir Tim, named last year as the greatest living Briton, is rightly heralded as the godfather of the web. It was he who, as a physicist working in Switzerland, turned the internet from a disparate collection of academic and military computer systems into an international network.
“Heralded” is used as an alternative to “named” but it’s not really. (Proper use would be, Ken Clarke heralded by Guido Fawkes as the future Tory leader …) To say someone is “rightly” called X only means “I think they are X” — so why not just say that? Berners-Lee isn’t the “godfather” of the web; he invented HTML (or ‘Html’ if you prefer the Guardian Style guide for acronyms). He’s arguably the “father” of the web, as he conceived it; but he’s not the godfather unless you count his work for the World Wide Web Consortium. Not many web users listen to the WWC: validator result for the Guardian page. The internet was an international network already. I could go on …
Even when the paper has a fair point, it loses it in cloudy prose. I’ve wondered what the British Psychological Society has to say about qualified psychologists being involved with Big Brother, when its ethical guidelines prohibit members from running similar experiments.
Racial tension, sexual harassment, masturbation with a bottle - this year’s Big Brother has plunged to new depths in reality television. From self-loathing gay hairdresser Craig groping drunken geordie Anthony, to wannabe footballer’s wife Saskia telling Zimbabwean nurse Makosi her Afro hairdo looked like “a fucking wig”. All of which prompts the question: just what are the programme’s psychologists doing?
But Makosi is wearing a wig. Surely the Graun, having used ‘Fuck’ on the cover of G2 can’t be objecting to its adjectival form.
According to the British Psychological Society’s code of conduct, psychologists should “hold the interest and welfare of those in receipt of their services to be paramount at all times and ensure that the interests of participants in research are safeguarded”. But can this duty ever be reconciled with the entertainment values of reality television? How is it in the “interest” of Kinga to allow her to masturbate with a wine bottle on television while drunk? What benefit is there in someone so ill at ease with their sexuality as Craig — dubbed the “camp crimper” by the tabloids — being allowed to get away with fondling Anthony, the object of his increasingly obsessive affections?
But the contestants are not “in receipt of” the psychologists’ services while in the house and they are not “participants in research” so there is technically no problem. What matters is why their colleagues let them continue. Of course anyone with principles would turn it down. (The piece fails to mention that one of the pundits on the show was Geoffrey Beattie who used to write for the Guardian: he seems to have left, possibly for very good reasons.) I don’t understand the use of the word “allow” above. What are the producers supposed to do? Is there to be a voice from behind the mirror ordering “Kinga, step away from the wine bottle"? It’s not what the contestants do: it’s that the programme was always designed to humiliate.
[David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of Central England, “who briefly worked on last year’s Big Brother"] said: “Big Brother was the kind of thing we could watch together as a family. I wouldn’t even let my 14-year-old son watch it now. The masturbation with the bottle was a new low. It’s reinventing itself as soft porn — presenting behaviour we’d condemn as antisocial if we saw it in Faliraki or on the high street on a Saturday night as entertainment.”
Hell, I’ve always enjoyed anti-social behaviour as entertainment, ever since I first watched Top Cat (gangster, con-animal, etc), but then he was based on Sgt Bilko (conman, card sharp, etc) and I love Laurel and Hardy and the coyote in Roadrunner. Then there’s loons like Othello, Hamlet, MacBeth, Julius Caesar … Just as “dog bites man” isn’t news, people behaving “socially” isn’t entertainment. Big Brother was always like this.
These 559 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:18pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 13 August 2005
Opening Sentence Of The Day »
Oh duh! It was only when I read Sam Leith on Omar Bakri that I thought, “Shit! Him!”
He will probably, we can assume, have intuited that his popularity is not at an all-time high.
But after months of headlines screaming to know why members of the previously cherished Preachers of Hate community can’t be immediately sent overseas, he obviously got some sort of message. Off he went to Lebanon. “Fury as hate preacher is allowed to escape to Lebanon,” was then the gist of the headlines. How dare he leave before we got the chance to deport him? The fiend.
…
He was a particular favourite of mine when I was writing diary columns. You’d phone him up and ask him about, say, what Islamic law would prescribe were Jemima Khan ever to leave the faith. “She is apostate! She is heretic! She must be execute!” he would rant, cheerfully.
My friend Tanya, in what I regard as a scoop of unusual genius, managed to get him drawn into a long conversation about his favourite sort of chocolate bar. The Guardian’s Jon Ronson made a brilliantly funny film, in which he followed him round for weeks volunteering to help drum up support for the infidel-smiting business.
He was a silly, bearded man in love with the sound of his own voice. He still is a silly, bearded man in love with the sound of his own voice. He longs to be taken seriously. I don’t think we should do him the favour of doing so.
And this is Jon Ronson (and the excuse for the title of this post):
It was a balmy Saturday afternoon in Trafalgar Square in the summertime, and Omar Bakri Mohammed was declaring Holy War on Britain. He stood on a podium at the front of Nelson’s column and announced that he would not rest until he saw the Black Flag of Islam flying over Downing Street, There was much cheering. The space had been rented out by Westminster Council.
Er, isn’t the flag of Islam green? I thought Black Flag was inter alia an LA punk band and an insecticide. Still, he should know. I know I bang on about the similarities between certain conservatives and radical Islam, but it’s not just Mark Steyn and James Lileks who want to bring down the United Nations.
Yacob Zaki is white and Scottish, a former Presbyterian who converted to Islam when he was a teenager. He lives in Greenock, a port near Glasgow. He is Greenock’s only militant Muslim convert. …
’Well,’ said Yacob, ‘one time I wanted to release a swarm of mice into the United Nations headquarters. Women hate mice, you know. I thought it was a brilliantly simple idea. One swarm of mice would have crushed the whole UN process, don’t you think?’
’Women standing on chairs,’ I agreed.
’But Omar said no,’ said Yacob, ‘He said it was a stupid idea.’
Perhaps I should slip that idea into a comment on LGF. I won’t mention the source.
At 9 o’clock the next morning I sat in Omar’s living room while Omar played with his baby daughter.
’What’s your daughter’s name?’ I asked him.
’It is a difficult name for you to understand,’ said Omar.
’Does it have an English translation?’ I asked.
’Yes,’ said Omar, ‘it translates into English as “The Black Flag of Islam”. ’
’Really?’ I said. ‘Your daughter’s name is the Black Flag of Islam?’
’Yes,’ said Omar.
’Really,?’ I said.
There was a small pause.
’You see,’ said Omar, ‘why our cultures can never integrate?”
The Lion King was playing on the video. We watched the scene where the warthog sings ‘’Hakuna Matata’. the song about how wonderful it is to have problem-free philosophies and no worries. Omar sang along, bouncing the baby on his knee.
I can’t begin to express how much safer I feel knowing that Omar Bakri cannot enter the country again.
These 124 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:53am GMT Permanent link.
What Do I Need English For? »
I’m adding Devil’s Kitchen to the sidebar. He’s a difficult, argumentative bastard, which is a good thing, even if he chooses to argue with people I like (Nosemonkey for instance), and he quite good at it, too, which is also in his favour. He lives in Edinburgh, apparently the home of funny money (and where I grew up). Besides, he links to me, and I’m a hoor.
(I would question his wisdom, however, in having a stonking blog ad for a design company on his site, when he runs his own.)
He also makes a rather good point (which I found via a trackback on Jamie’s site).
As an Auxiliary nurse, I had to take one of my paraplegic patients to his father’s funeral. The family were Greek Cypriots. The mother had been living in England for over 30 years, and all she could say was, “Hello”, “Please” and “Goodbye”. Immigrants shouldn’t speak English at home in order to inculcate a sense of Britishness; they should speak English at home so that they can do the shopping and live a life. We condemn the schools, and the government, for allowing children to leave unable to read or right English and yet we praise those who “stay true to their roots” and are similarly unable to live a life unsupported. Just chucking that into the pot, old chap.
Well I agree with his reasoning. I know people who speak Welsh at home (and bugger David Blunkett). I’ve known academics who speak latin for the hell of it.
Yet I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t find something to disagree with. I don’t know about the ‘yet we praise’ part. I don’t know that we do praise them. It’s more mutual non-interference, which is what I call civilised. Anyway, here’s a bit from a book that came into my head when I woke up this morning.
To me there is nothing foreign in these hats, siedlocks, and fringes. It is my childhood revisited. At the age of six, I myself wore a tallith katan, or scapular, under my shirt, only mine was a scrap of green calico print, whereas theirs are white linen. God instructed Moses to speak to the children of Israel and to “bid them that they make fringes in the borders of their garments.” So they are still wearing them four thousand years later. We find our seats, two in a row of three, toward the rear of the aircraft. The third is occupied by a young Hasid, highly excited, who is staring at me.
“Do you speak Yiddish?” he says.
“Yes, certainly.”
“I cannot be next to your wife. Please sit between us. Be so good,” he says.
“Of course.”
I take the middle seat, which I dislike, but I am not really put out. Curious, rather. Our Hasid is in his late twenties. He is pimply, his neck is thin, his blue eyes goggle, his underlip extrudes. He does not keep a civilised face. Thoughts and impulses other than civilised fill it — by no means inferior impulses and thoughts. And though he is not permitted to sit beside women unrelated to him or to look at them or to communicate with them in any manner (all of which probably saves him a great deal of trouble), he seems a good-hearted young man and he is visibly enjoying himself. All the Hasidim are vividly enjoying themselves, dodging through the aisles, visiting chattering standing impatiently in the long lavatory lines, amiable, busy as geese. They pay no attention to signs. Don’t they understand English? The stewardesses are furious with them. I ask one of the hostesses when I may expect to receive a drink and she cries out in irritation, “Back to your seat.” She says this in so ringing a voice that I retreat. No so the merry-minded Hasidim, exulting everywhere. The orders given by these young gentile uniformed females are nothing to them, To them they are merely attendants, exotic bediener, all but bodyless.
Anticipating a difficulty, I ask the stewardess to serve me a kosher lunch. “I can’t do that, we haven’t enough for them,” she says. “We weren’t prepared.” Her big British eyes are affronted and her bosom has risen with indignation. “We’ve got to go out of our way to Rome for more of their special meals.”
Amused, my wife asks why I ordered the kosher lunch. “Because when the bring the chicken dinner this kid with the beard will be in a state,” I explain.
And so he is. The British Airways chicken with the chill of death upon it lies before me. But after three hours of security exercises at Heathrow I am hungry. The young Hasid recoils when the tray is handed to me. He addresses me again in Yiddish. He says, “I must talk to you. You won’t be offended?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You may want to give me a slap in the face.”
“Why should I?”
“You are a Jew. You must be a Jew, we are speaking Yiddish. How can you eat — that!”
“It looks awful doesn’t it?”
“You mustn’t touch it. My womenfolk packed kosher-beef sandwiches for me. Is your wife Jewish.?”
Here I’m obliged to lie. Alexandra is Rumanian. But I can’t give him too many shocks at once, and I say, “She has not had a Jewish upbringing.”
“She doesn’t speak Yiddish?”
“Not a word. But excuse me, I want my lunch.”
’Will you eat some of my kosher food instead, as a favor?”
“With pleasure.”
“Then I will give you a sandwich, but only on one condition. You must never—never—eat trephena food again.”
“I can’t promise you that. You’re asking too much. And just for one sandwich.”
“I have a duty toward you,” he tells me. “Will you listen to a proposition?”
“Of course I will.”
“So let us make a deal. I am prepared to pay you. If you will eat nothing but kosher food, for the rest of your life I will send you fifteen dollars a week.”
“That’s very generous,” I say.
“Well, you are a Jew,” he says, “I must try to save you.”
“How do you earn your living?”
“In a Hasidic sweater factory in New Jersey. We are all Hasidim there. The boss is a Hasid. I came from Israel five years ago to be married in New Jersey. My rabbi is in Jerusalem.”
“How is it that you don’t know English?”
“What do I need English for?” So, I am asking, will you take my fifteen dollars?”
“Kosher food is far more expensive than other kinds,” I say. “Fifteen dollars isn’t nearly enough.”
“I can go as far as twenty-five.”
“I can’t accept such a sacrifice from you.”
Shrugging, he gives up. and I turn to the twice disagreeable chicken and eat guiltily, my appetite spoiled. The young Hasid opens his prayer book. “He’s so fervent,” says my wife. “I wonder if he’s praying for you.” She smiles at my discomfiture.
As soon as the trays are removed, the Hasidim block the aisles with their Mincah service, rocking themselves and stretching their necks upwards. The bond of common prayer is very strong. This is what has held the Jews together for thousands of years. “I like them,” says my wife. “They’re so lively, so childlike.”
“You might find them a little hard to live with,” I tell her. “You’d have to do everything their way, no options given.”
I was going to stop there, and surely that’s long enough. There’s more in that than I remembered. Not just the Hasidim who don’t speak English in New Jersey (that’s in the US of A, for Mark Steyn), but the tolerance expressed, both by the BA flight going out of its way for more meals, and in the writer’s gentle teasing — “It looks awful doesn’t it?” — and his civility while talking to someone who is not only wilfully ignorant of the language of his adopted country, but doesn’t pick up that the writer knows what kosher food is, and has clearly chosen to forsake it. Does any religion accept taking bribes as a virtue? But there’s more, and it’s still pertinent to integration and to medieval attitudes.
“But they’re cheerful, and they’re warm and natural. I love their costumes. Couldn’t you get me one of their beautiful hats?”
“I don’t know whether they sell them to outsiders.”
When the Hasid returns to his seat after prayers, I tell him that my wife a woman of learning, will be lecturing at the University in Jerusalem.
“What is she?”
“A mathematician.”
He is puzzled. “What is that?” he asks.
I try to explain.
He says, “This I never heard of. What actually is it they do?”
I am astonished. I knew that he was an innocent but I would never have believed him to be ignorant of such a thing. “So you don’t know what mathematicians are. Do you know what a physicist is? Do you recognize the name of Einstein?”
“Never. Who is he?”
This is too much for me.
If the young Hasid has never heard of Einstein, he only will not have heard of Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account. (The prize money is now about 1.3 million US dollars or $625 a week for the rest of Bellow’s life if he didn’t have many other sources of income.)
I don’t think Bellow does praise the Hasidim. But tolerating immigrants who won’t integrate is a feature of what was called the Anglosphere everywhere until recently. In tolerating the sexist medieval practices of Muslims we’re being just like our linguistic cousins in the US, Canada, Australia … And good for us.
These 437 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Nothing To See Here »
One thing that nearly all bloggers have in common is that they like to know when another blog links to them. Using a variety of sources, I think I have a pretty good handle on finding other blogs that link to J-Walk Blog. In fact, I think I find about 90% of them — but I may be wrong.This is an experiment to see how “findable” blog references are.
Via Mike Power.
These 7 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:41pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 14 August 2005
Handbags At Dawn »
If this were a put-down, it’d be the greatest put-down ever, Sadly, it’s a statement of fact.
Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Jar-Jar Binks.
In other words, Roger Ebert really doesn’t like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.
But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” while passing on the opportunity to participate in “Million Dollar Baby,” “Ray,” “The Aviator,” “Sideways” and “Finding Neverland.” As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.
I think it’s tragic that the arts community is generally dominated by liberals, while conservatives presumably handle the money.
These 48 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:19am GMT Permanent link.
I Should Read Comments Threads More Often »
DO NOT READ THIS WHILE EATING: Floyd Alvis Cooper:
I know this isn’t going to popular on this website, but may I just point something out?
A soldier’s #1 job is to stay alive. If you die, you can’t accomplish the mission, and you weaken your team and put your buddies in danger.
Obviously Sheehan’s son, I forget his name at the moment, didn’t die on purpose, and he may well have have had no control over the circumstances that let to his death.
BUT.
In war, there are no excuses. You find a way to stay alive, whatever it takes — if you’re a good soldier. Sheehan’s son didn’t do that. He paid the price. but he als failed the mission and let down his buddies.
As a soldier, he was a failure. He was brave (maybe), but he was also incompetent.
So, really, how much exactly are we supposed to grieve over this guy? Isn’t a certain amount of disapproval in order for the guy — and by extension his mom, for making such a fuss over a person who was, in the last analysis, by definition a loser?
So shouldn’t Mrs. Sheenhan be showing a little more shame about the situation and maybe not wanting to get her son and his shortcoming splashed all over the media?
Something to consider, anyway.
Via Atrios.
These 11 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:37am GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 15 August 2005
Arthur Silber On Christopher Hitchens »
Everything you ever needed to know about Christopher Hitchens:
They [Islamist radicals or, as Hitchens calls them, Islamo-fascists] gave us no peace and we shouldn’t give them any. We can’t live on the same planet as them and I’m glad because I don’t want to. I don’t want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murders and rapists and torturers and child abusers. Its them or me. I’m very happy about this because I know it will be them. It’s a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it’s also a pleasure. I don’t regard it as a grim task at all.
He views war possibly on a worldwide scale as “a pleasure,” and doesn’t “regard it as a grim task at all.” Easy for him to say, the lying bastard. He’s not likely to be on the front lines, or anywhere near them.
This is the mentality of the Apocalyptic Crusader, the man who yearns for sacred violence and death as the means of purification of a corrupted world—the destruction which is indispensable in his view for the creation of a new totalitarian state. From that perspective, he and our actual enemies are genuine soulmates—which is, not coincidentally but by the inner logic of the premises they both share, why they are locked in this battle to the death.
I do like the implication that the Dupe is doing something to defeat them. What’s he going to do, bore the bombers to death telling them how it’s not him in The Bonfire of the Vanities?
It is undeniably true that many of today’s neoconservatives are former liberals and leftists, and some of them are Trotskyites like Hitchens himself. I have analyzed the neofascist program set forth by Irving Kristol in some detail, and Kristol’s intellectual journey is typical of this group.
As I have said on a number of occasions, in their transition from left to right, their worship of the State and of authoritarianism generally is the one constant that has remained unchanged for these leftists-turned-neoconservatives. In addition, as I explained here, these newly-minted rightists were leftists of a particular kind: they were vicious nihilists—and nihilists they remain. David Horowitz is the perfect representative of this kind of intellectually backward thug. In fact, in that earlier essay I noted with a bit of astonishment that Horowitz himself has chosen to advertise his former associations.
These 45 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:16pm GMT Permanent link.
Teach The Controversy! »
It’s an old story, but no less worrying for that. Rachel Sylvester in the Telegraph: Mr Blair fears his city academies have not passed the test.
There has been controversy, too, about the Middlesbrough King’s Academy, funded by an evangelical Christian, where pupils are given additional classes in creationist theory. And earlier this year, ministers had to bail out the Unity City Academy — where pupils are, according to the Department for Education and Skills website, encouraged to learn “outside the classroom environment” with “visual, auditory and kinaesthetic” teaching to the tune of £1.4 million.
I couldn’t resist the Unity City Academy part. £1.4M for football! (If it’s not, they’re as stupid as the creationists.) Do the old bog standard comprehensives get that much cash? Course they don’t. It’s just like selective education — but paid by the taxpayer. Le plus mauvais de mondes possible, senor.
It is of course quite wrong that pupils are “given additional classes in creationist theory” and not taught the controversy — the rival belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don’t.
You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s.
There’s a graph for anyone going through Chris Lightfoot withdrawal.
Now I’ve mentioned Blair, I’m worried about the likelihood of the following.
Tony Blair (sighs closes book, revealing it to be The Da Vinci Code): Cheri? Darling? I’m having second thoughts about this conversion business. This Opus Dei crowd are a rum bunch, aren’t they?
Cheri: It’s just a stupid book. Everything in it is made up!
Tony: It can’t be. There really was a Da Vinci. And there really is a Vatican.
Cheri (slowly): It’s like the Iraq intelligence, dear. It’s about real people and places, but the details are all made up.
Tony: What are you talking about? That was real. Alastair said so. And this Dan Brown is coining it. I think we could be ever such good friends.
These 243 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:37pm GMT Permanent link.
Doctorow On The White House »
Via Brian Leiter, this quite brilliant diagnosis of George W Bush by E.L. Doctorow.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life … they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war’s aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.
Leiter quotes much more and concludes:
The next time someone has the gall to repeat the obscenity that Bush got the “moral values” vote, send them to E.L. Doctorow.
“Moral values” don’t mean caring or humaneness, but merely being “assured of certain certainties” as T.S. Eliot had it.
These 39 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:21pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 16 August 2005
Pulling Out Early -- It's Just For Catholics »
Bob Odenkirk Supports the Troops.
I am only watching Fox TV, so at least I am getting the full story. But I am furious at all of you pussies! Start supporting the fucking troops again. Get your fucking yellow ribbons out and start telling pollsters that you support the war wholeheartedly with no reservations, because SUPPORTING THE WAR MEANS SUPPORTING THE TROOPS AND VICE VERSA AND LINDSEY LOHAN AND YELLOWRIBBONS!
Douglas of the Drink Soaked etc, on an email sent to the Tampa Tribune.
Did you know that 47 countries have re-established their embassies in Iraq?” the anonymous polemic asks, in part. “Did you know that 3,100 schools have been renovated?”
“Of course we didn’t know!” the message concludes. “Our media doesn’t tell us!
Yes indeed! Every time an embassy opens, a fairy gets its little wings! We should have live on the ground minute-by-minute coverage of embassy openings. Here come the Syrians! Isn’t it great that once again Baghdad welcomes diplomats from Syria? And Libya! Watch out for the machine guns, boys! You know what those crazy Libyans did in London. (Perhaps that’s not a good idea. Try some other countries, France! Cuba! North Korea! Zimbabwe!) And school renovations! At present the media cover stuff like the ousted former mayor of Baghdad, but who gives a shit? I could watch schools being painted all day. Bad media.
(No I have no idea which countries have opened embassies, because the media didn’t tell me. Somehow I fear that if they did, there would be complaints about — yawn — bias. “Why are the French covered?” etc.)
These 162 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:17am GMT Permanent link.
Fun With Sullivan »
Atrios finds a remarkable passage in an unreadable Andrew Sullivan essay (I tried reading it when P O’Neill linked to it, but the gag reflex kicked in).
The real shift can only come from below — from a million small decisions to scrub a wall of graffiti, to rear a child, marry a loved one, teach an immigrant, turn off a mobile phone, look out for an elderly neighbour, decline that last beer. These things change not when politicians or bishops demand that they do. They change when people have finally had enough of the boorishness that selfishness sustains.
Atrios asks apropos the “million small decisions”, “how many do you think Sully has actually made?” Well I can imagine Banksy being unamused by the first of those. I asked my priest for advice on rearing a child, and he said, “Be sure to take his trousers off first” which I didn’t understand at all, I had a friend who wanted to marry a loved one but his first two wives swore they’d leave him if he did, and then everyone loves their mum, but a card on Mother’s Day is more suitable than an offer of marriage isn’t it? I wrote to Salman Rushdie to tell him that I thought his sentence construction was laboured and pretentious. I can’t print his reply. I hope Gerry Adams can teach Omar Bakri about bombs which go off when they’re supposed to when he comes back to this country. Whenever I turn my mobile on, I’m confronted with messages like, “Turn your phone on, you selfish bastard!” If people want to speak to you I really don’t see how turning your mobile off is saintly. I went round to my 80-year old neighbour’s last year, and threw out all her gin bottles and filled her fridge with organic smoothies, much better for her really. The restraining order lasts five years, with no appeal. Murderers get less! I can see Andrew “declining that last beer.” Cries of “but it’s your round!” will be met with “Now don’t be so selfish!”
Moral: it’s better to be a boor than a smug prick.
These 285 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:55am GMT Permanent link.
A Manipulative S&M Bottom With No Real Feeling For Anyone Other Than Himself »
The Sully piece in the last post was suggested to Atrios by David E who steamrollers this worthless toss in the Guardian about Francis Bacon. And he appreciates how good Pinter still is, calling him “a man whose piss Christopher Hitchens is unfit to drink (no matter how much he longs to …)”.
And I forgot to add in the previous post: would that be warm beer Andrew is talking about declining?
These 72 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:09am GMT Permanent link.
Not The Next Level Or The One Above But Higher »
Sheer awesome genius. (Plus the freedom-hating kittens are cute.) You don’t stuff like this on Powertools. Kittens are for girls, and those boys, being all men (so ‘Hindrocket’ is a suggestive name) don’t like girls! Or kittens! They’re manly men, and all the men in their manly men bar say so. Clean living guys who go to the gym and drink in their leather trousers and vests to show off their hot bods. And they all have impressive manly men moustaches. Talk about clean-living: they could sing along to the Sound of Music all night. John Hindrocket’s not gay. Any talk of gayness really upsets him. That’s how manly a man he is. Why he has a friend called the “Big Trunk.”
I’ll never stop laughing at those names. The Editors are great, but the competition doesn’t need to try — it has natural born hilarity.
These 146 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:04pm GMT Permanent link.
My Head Will Explode In 5, 4 ... »
Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast says: If you don’t buy Starbucks’ burnt coffee, the American Taliban wins. Egad, it’s the “Concerned Women for America” (on the BP — for “Baptist Press” — website).
After nearly a decade of lying low, Starbucks has reentered the homosexual rights movement in a few ways that have put at least one conservative watchdog group on alert.
The world’s most famous coffee shop chain has begun a program called “The Way I See It,” which is a collection of thoughts, opinions and expressions provided by notable figures that now appear on Starbucks coffee cups, according to the chain’s website.
Disingenuousness alert! Note the “Starbucks has reentered the homosexual rights movement” (ooh matron!) and the “at least one” — ie we only know of one lot of busybodies, but we’ll hint that there are more.
But one particular quote—#43—blatantly pushes the homosexual agenda. It’s by Armistead Maupin, who wrote “Tales of the City,” a bestseller-turned-PBS drama advocating the homosexual lifestyle, and it reads:
“My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too [expletive] short.”
There’s a homosexual agenda? Why does no one tell me anything? I’ve read the books and seen the TV show, and I still don’t know what the “homosexual agenda” is. Perhaps I should write to Hindrocket of Powertools; he’s not gay, but he is a conservative, and he tells people he’s not gay, but he a conservative who gets upset like this, because calling someone gay is the lowest thing you can do, and he’s not gay if I didn’t say so before. (Got to watch these lawyers, especially these so not-gay ones.) After all these ladies know what it is, and I bet they’re no gay. (No that there’s anything wrong with that, as they’re unlikely to say.)
Concerned Women for America, one of the nation’s leading conservative public policy organizations, is sounding the alarm about the cups after one of its employees received one when she purchased coffee from one of the stores.
Meghan Kleppinger, assistant to the national field director at CWA, wrote a column about Starbucks’ involvement in the homosexual movement which was posted by WorldNetDaily Aug. 10.
Kleppinger, who had been a frequent patron of Starbucks until recently vowing to stop, was put on notice about Starbucks earlier this summer when she received an e-mail from the California arm of CWA describing an annual “gay pride” parade in San Diego. The parade sounded like a typical event, she thought, until she read on.
“I read where there would be children’s gardens and basically in the midst of all of this sexual activity there would be events for children,” she said Aug. 8. “And then I read that two registered pedophiles were volunteers at this event. When I scrolled to the bottom I saw who the sponsors were, and the one that jumped out was Starbucks because that is a favorite company of mine. So it just frustrated me that a company was giving money to something like this where children would be exposed to this sort of thing.”
Hold on, let’s take this chronologically. Ms Kleppinger (among others, one presumes) was sent an email by another cell branch of her organisation, which read, “STARBUCKS IS BAD!!!!” or words to that effect. I know know where all this sexual activity is supposed to me, it makes me want to go though. What is “this sort of thing” if I may ask? There just may be a story about the “registered pedophiles” — but if they’re registered that means they have to do certain things — like tell the police of their movements. (I’m not certain about the relevant state laws — it seems the CWA (or as they prefer CWfA) are based in Washington, D.C.; I couldn’t wring that detail from the article — but ‘registered’ if it’s being used correctly means that their actions are circumscribed.) So Ms Kleppinger was looking out for Starbucks to do something to promote this still mysterious “homosexual agenda.” Note that the Maupin quote is number 43. And she’s an assistant. How many cups of coffee did she have to fetch?
If Starbucks knowingly was sponsoring a parade that put children in danger, that would be “blatant irresponsibility,” Kleppinger wrote in her column. And if they were doing it unknowingly, they should have investigated before handing over the money, she said.
This isn’t just a slur on Starbucks but also on the Gay Pride organisers (not that CWA would be bothered by that) and the local boys in blue.
Kleppinger then found that the company is listed on the website of pro-abortion rights Planned Parenthood under this introduction: “The following companies all generously match employee donations to Planned Parenthood Federation of America. If your employer is on this list, then you can make your gift go as much as twice as far.”
And at “gay pride” events in Seattle, Wash., in July, about 75 Starbucks employees wore promotional T-shirts while followed by a van with the company logo in a parade, Kleppinger reported, and employees passed out samples of a new specialty coffee drink.
Hang on, we were talking about “Gay Pride” where did “Planned Parenthood” spring from? And why did it vanish again? The horror! Starbucks made its employees wear “promotional T-shirts” and they “passed out samples of a new specialty coffee drink.” This should be made illegal immediately! (Don’t these people hate communists interfering with the free market? Oh yes, they do.)
So I ought to rush to Starbucks, but I don’t drink coffee. Also their contributors include Deepak Chopra and Michael Medved. So, it’s head explosion time. I should … but then I can’t …
What the hell, the nearest Starbuck’s is just round the corner from my friend Lynne’s excellent cafe. So good for Starbucks for pissing off the Taliban, but, er no thanks.
These 517 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:33pm GMT Permanent link.
Point Blank »
The Menezes story is now quite unbelievable. When it happened, I thought something like, “Good for the police; it’s a tough job, and I’m glad they do it” and things like that. As I said in one of John B’s comments, I know someone who used to be in the armed branch of the Met, and I’m disposed to think well of them. And my faith in the London flatfeet still flickers:
The report also reveals for the first time that a member of the surveillance team, who sat nearby, got involved and grabbed Senhor de Menezes before he was shot: “I heard shouting which included the word ‘police’ and turned to face the male in the denim jacket.
“He immediately stood up and advanced towards me and the CO19 officers … I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side.
“I then pushed him back onto the seat where he had been previously sitting … I then heard a gun shot very close to my left ear and was dragged away onto the floor of the carriage.”
The [London] Times: New claims over bungled shooting of Brazilian. (Via Matthew Turner.) I know that they’re under extraordinary pressure, but this team managed to kill someone who was, it seems, under the control of a fellow officer, not armed or wearing anything which could be taken for a weapon or posing any real danger.
The investigation report states that the firearms unit of the police had been told that “unusual tactics” may be required and if they “were deployed to intercept a subject and there was an opportunity to challenge, but if the subject was non compliant, a critical shot may be taken.”
How compliant does he have to be? If one officer can pin his arms and push him back into his seat, he can’t have been putting up any kind of fight.
Still there’s one good thing: I haven’t seen so few new blog posts by the usual suspects since Christmas Day. Maybe it’s this story: Where are the cries of complaint? Hello. Cat got your tongues?
Updated to spell Menezes’ name correctly.
These 193 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:31pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 17 August 2005
If You Ever Thought Regular Journalists Couldn't Do Fisking »
Vicki Woods is your woman.
Oh, I get it. It’s about too many women cluttering up his own [Michael Buerk’s] room.
“Almost all the big jobs in broadcasting were held by women — the controllers of BBC 1 and Radio 4 for example. These are the people who decide what we see and hear”, he told the Radio Times. Well, I guess if you’ve had twin sons who have both grown up to follow their papa’s trade, you might lament the long-dead days when only people a) in trousers and b) named Dimbleby could land the blue-chip broadcasting jobs.
But I am baffled by his use of “we” to mean men. I was never a fan of “chairpersons” and the nonsense of calling history “herstory”, but I do think “we” (when you’re referring to a Radio 4 audience, or a newspaper readership) is gender-neutral. Women comprise half of any constituency you care to name, and the larger half (if you’ll forgive my mathematical looseness). I’m as much “we” as Buerk’s trousered minority is, and his crossness about the fact that Head of News at the BBC is now a woman, Helen Boaden, fills me with awe.
“[W]hat we see and hear” is a familiar trope among the BBC-bashers, and I’m not convinced that by “we” Michael Buerk meant “men.” Other than than, it’s thoroughly splendid.
I worked for the Daily Mail in the mid-1980s. It was famously a paper “for women” and the advertising campaigns always had a pretty girl bent studiously over a news page. (The copy was something like: “Hair appointment once a month; pedicure once a week; Daily Mail every day”. Ooh — raunchy.)
At my first morning conference, I was one of only two women, and that morning’s paper had a small news item headlined: “Man and blonde die in crash”. Man and blonde? Blimey.
Since all the news sub-editors were brilliant, and all were men, I fully understood why they’d written it. Headlining a four-line nib (newspaper word for News in Brief) is not something you want to labour over, yet you have to give it some resonance. Dead blondes have loads of resonance, not to say Chandleresque glamour. But — give me a break. “Woman and slaphead” would have resonance, too. It took me six months (and many cunning lunches making the editor, David English, laugh) to persuade a less irritatingly sexist resonance into their headlines. “Crash orphans three under-fives” was always a goodie.
I am a huge admirer of Ms Woods: she’s a sensible conservative — not the kind who blames the 60s. And this should be a different post altogether, but she has “moral authority” (to quote the Dupe slurring Maureen Dowd). Blair saves world and Iraq’s forgotten.
As for war, some of us just have to bore on. The son of the house is going back to Iraq. Again. For a year. And not to business-friendly Kurdistan this time (where people can meet friends in restaurants) but to pestilential Baghdad. So little appears in the public prints these days that I am back to surfing the net in the small hours for anything I can find out.
I know that the temperature yesterday was 41C, so by the dog-days of August it will be over 50. Sounds even hotter in old money (125F) and feels even hotter when you’re dressed in deliberately non-Western clothes in order to pass in a crowd (fake “Calvin Klein” shirts, Iraqi-style Seventies check, 100 per cent polyester).
I know that the electricity supply is worse than ever, and the water-supply often fails entirely. I know that the seven miles of road from Baghdad Airport is the most dangerous in the world. Oh — and I finally know his blood-group.
Perhaps being a woman, and one with a son actually in Iraq (Vicki Woods 2; G.W. Bush 0) she understands Cindy Sheehan better than other comment writers, like the Dupe or Michelle Malkin. Wherever he is, Blair should stay there.
This year, President Bush has an unwelcome guest at Crawford. An anti-war protester, Cindy Sheehan, has set up camp outside the President’s ranch. She is a bereaved mother, whose son Casey, a Marine, was killed in action in Baghdad in April 2004. Sheehan has posters up, and clumps of noisy protesters of all kinds of stripe backing her, and loudspeakers, and night vigils and all that sort of stuff.
She wants to see the President “for an hour”, to ask him a) “Why did you kill my son?” and b) “When will you bring the troops home from Iraq?” She’s getting a lot of coverage from interested press-persons (who obviously don’t enjoy their month in Crawford any more than I would) and they gather round her at all hours, since she’s obviously more televisual than grasshoppers.
The President has already had a face-to-face with Mrs Sheehan, at Fort Lewis in Washington, not long after her son was killed. Apparently, she was quite pleased with the meeting at the time, but now she is reneging. The President “didn’t know my son’s name”, she says. He called him “your loved one”. He didn’t know her name either, and called her “mom” and told her that he “felt her grief”.
She has obviously gone mad with anguish about her dead boy, and is in constant touch with other Troops-out-NOW! people. Some of whom are obviously maddened with loss as well, but others are political groups who see her as a lodestar for the anti-war movement. Anyway, she is spoiling the President’s summer rather.
Anti-war protest is always irritatingly messy, both physically and philosophically. Think of that man Brian Haw, who lives in Parliament Square with his loudspeakers and his scrappy posters and banners and so forth. I can’t really work out what his beef is, not politically, but it amuses me to have him sitting there, messing up the square and yelling “Think of the Iraqi children!” at all hours.
It also amuses me that Tony Blair so disliked having him and his anti-war mess dribbling about in front of the House of Commons that he created a special law just for Haw. It hasn’t worked for Haw so far, and I’m not sure it will, but I’m a bit worried that it might work for my pro-hunting Yorkshire friend next time she chains herself to the Commons railings.
And it might work for you and me and my neighbour the headhunter’s wife if we ever wanted to wave a polite banner along the Embankment some time. I am so not looking forward to Tony’s return, tanned and refreshed from his holidays.
Another son also went to Iraq, as she revealed in her review of Baghdad Bulletin by Dave Enders.
It was the first English-language publication in Iraq for decades. It lasted seven issues, which in our house felt like seven lifetimes. Because, as soon as the first issue was printed to a flurry of bemused publicity, my son, then 25, threw up his perfectly safe, well-paid job at the Evening Standard to join them for a dollar a day. So did three post-Oxford girls and James Brandon, all also in their early twenties.
The story of the Baghdad Bulletin resonated very heavily in our house, so you may understand why I fell on this book with hunger and read it twice through, straight off. I too had said: “Be careful, sweetheart.” Hoping they’d be safe enough, it was an eye-opener to read Enders’s account of four of their Iraqi staff having a barney and falling silent as he passed. “I find out later that Ziad had been arguing about their duty as Sunnis to kill ‘the foreigners’. Shalaan took care of that one. ‘They’re too young,’ he said.”
Robert Fisk comes across as petulant.
Enders sets up a meeting with Robert Fisk, “one of the best-known anti-occupation journalists”, who gives the Bulletin staff “an ass-kicking” for their lack of experience and for not taking “an outright oppositional stance”. Despite the “patronising dismissal”, Enders asks him to write a guest piece. He refuses: “You ran [Daniel] Pipes, didn’t you?”
It’s true that he ran Daniel Pipes.
The first issue was entirely written by Hassall and Enders with guest writers, Iraqi and international, whose opinion pieces took in “the full spectrum of viewpoints”, from LaRita Smith, a very naggy “human shield”, to the ultra-conservative Daniel Pipes (who seems, says Enders, “to actually believe in a Pax Israelica"), to Ann Clwyd (who gave her copy to Tony Blair).
And like the late Steven Vincent, he goes where the troops fear to tread.
Sometimes he wears his youth, deliberately, on his sleeve: “I’m 23 years old — these soldiers, these troops, these grunts, they’re not much different from me.” Oh, but they are. During a tedious embed near Balad ("the driest place I’ve ever been"), he tells the grunts that, yes, Iraqis do drink beer, and punts them a handful of dinars “in case they get a chance to buy some. They’ve never seen the local currency.”
These 165 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:01am GMT Permanent link.
Better Late Than Never »
Britblog roundup: worth reading. As always.
These 6 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:21am GMT Permanent link.
Don't Be A Clown, Turn That 'D' Upside Down »
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. …
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Eliot, Burnt Norton
For reasons which pass understanding to lesser minds Norman Geras refers to Hitchens major as “The Dude” (and he doesn’t remotely resemble Jeff Bridges). This would be the guy whom Michael Totten quotes:
Christopher Hitchens said to Ghassan Atiyyah: “If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power.” And of course he was right. We didn’t invade Iraq so we could midwife the birth of yet another despicable tyranny.
U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq.
“What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. “We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”
…
“We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic,” said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity. “That process is being repeated all over.”
U.S. officials now acknowledge that they misread the strength of the sentiment among Kurds and Shiites to create a special status. The Shiites’ request this month for autonomy to be guaranteed in the constitution stunned the Bush administration, even after more than two years of intense intervention in Iraq’s political process, they said.
We don’t hear much about this from the Dupe, who after all, wrote several Slate columns (collected as Regime Change) or much about poor Ahmed Chalabi (his criminal record never suggested that he might not be telling the truth). The comedy starts with the passage Norm quotes, presumably with approval:
I think one must deny to anyone the right to ventriloquize the dead. Casey Sheehan joined up as a responsible adult volunteer. Are we so sure that he would have wanted to see his mother acquiring “a knack for P.R.” and announcing that he was killed in a war for a Jewish cabal?
(Ms Sheehan denied saying this. Via Ted Barlow on Chris Bertram’s post on Hitchens.) So, if I understand this, Hitchens 1) says we should not “ventriloquize the dead” (actually, he says we should stop others “ventriloquiz[ing] the dead”). 2) Ventriloquizes the late Casey Sheehan himself. Priceless. I’m sure that Specialist Sheehan would not have wanted to die, but the Dupe strangely leaves that to one side. His military bearing shows though: A soldier’s #1 job is to stay alive. Hitchens does that awfully well.
Other than that, what is he talking about? He finds the weakest defence of Ms Sheehan he can find: Maureen Dowd in the NYT. Then he calls Ms Dowd’s meaningless sentence, “The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute” “an unambivalent statement.” I don’t know what “moral authority” is (it sounds like the religious police), but as parents of the 1858 US casualties disagree, I don’t see how any of them can be “absolute.” It is, in other words, a particularly silly piece of columnist flim-flam.
Cindy Sheehan may have changed her mind, but she is not responsible for space-fillers in the New York press. So when Hitchens says he is “at a complete loss to see how these two positions can be made compatible” who can disagree? The question is, why is he even trying?
Suppose I had lost a child in this war. Would any of my critics say that this gave me any extra authority? I certainly would not ask or expect them to do so.
Since he asks, yes I would say that. Quit the rhetorical leading questions.
In pursuit of this, she has set up camp near Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and announced that she will not leave until she gets some more face-time with our chief executive.
“Our” chief executive? Is the Dupe an American citizen now?
The president has compromised by sending his national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, down that Crawford road to meet the PR-knackish Cindy. Not good enough, exclaims Dowd. Hadley was pro-war and has even been described as a neocon!
Did Ms Sheehan really say not good enough for that reason? Let’s try the Times:
The President dispatched Stephen Hadley, his National Security Adviser, and Joe Hagin, a White House Deputy Chief of Staff, for a 45-minute chat with her. But Ms Sheehan refused to be fobbed off.
My emphasis. OK, Let’s try Reuters
White House officials said Bush had no plans to meet with Sheehan, saying he met with her in June 2004. National security adviser Stephen Hadley and deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin met her on Saturday, the day she started her vigil.
Hadley told reporters on Thursday that Bush understands Sheehan’s views on Iraq are deeply felt, but that “he just respectfully disagrees.” The White House released a list showing Bush has held 24 meetings with 900 family members of 272 troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since January 2002.
In response, Sheehan said the best way Bush can show compassion is by meeting with her and other mothers and family members gathered alongside Prairie Chapel Road in Crawford.
“Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice and we want answers. All we’re asking is that he sacrifice an hour out of his five-week vacation to talk to us, before the next mother loses her son in Iraq. He says he is spreading peace. How can you spread peace by killing people?” she said in a statement issued through Fenton Communications, a public relations firm.
It seems Hitchens is using his special licence to “make shit up,” as they say in the trade.
What dreary sentimental nonsense this all is, and how much space has been wasted on it. Most irritating is the snide idea that the president is “on vacation” and thus idly ignoring his suffering subjects, when the truth is that the members of the media—not known for their immunity to the charm of Martha’s Vineyard or Cape Cod in the month of August—are themselves lazing away the season with a soft-centered nonstory that practically, as we like to say in the trade, “writes itself.”
The president is on vacation. That’s why he’s in Crawford rather than Washington. If a few op-ed columns don’t get written so much the better for forestry, but hacks are not elected: Bush was. And either the hacks are in “Martha’s Vineyard or Cape Cod” or they’re in Texas. They can’t be both.
Anyway, Sheehan now says that if need be she will “follow” the president “to Washington,” so I don’t think the holiday sneer has much life left in it.
I don’t know what this is supposed to mean. I think Hitchens is trying to deny that Bush is on holiday. In a few weeks, Bush will return to Washington. Then the press won’t be saying “he’s on holiday ergo they lied when they said he was! Brilliant!
There are, in fact, some principles involved here. Any citizen has the right to petition the president for redress of grievance, or for that matter to insult him to his face. But the potential number of such people is very large, and you don’t have the right to cut in line by having so much free time that you can set up camp near his drive.
So you only do have the right if you don’t have the free time to actually try? There’s isn’t a line, whether of not “the potential number of such people is very large” so there’s no ‘cutting’ involved. It seems Hitchens wants everybody who has any grievance against the government to cancel each other out.
Then there is the question of civilian control over the military, which is an authority that one could indeed say should be absolute. The military and its relatives have no extra claim on the chief executive’s ear.
Some people like Hitchens’ style. I’m not among them. “[A]n authority that one could indeed say should be absolute” is an intentional tangle of words “one could” and “should” make any connection with reality impossible. One could, yes, but Hitchens isn’t actually screwing his courage to the sticking point and doing so. I’m not sure what “absolute” civilian control would be, if we don’t already have it. What does “extra” mean in “extra claim"? The military (and what relatives? does he mean NASA? — no I think he means “military personnel and their relatives” but who knows by this point?) makes a large claim in the budget and being the most numerous representatives abroad funded by the taxpayer as well as being there to actually kill people should have a very large claim on the executive’s attentions.
Indeed, it might be said that they have less claim than the rest of us, since they have voluntarily sworn an oath to obey and carry out orders.
He really is trying to confuse us with “military” and “military personnel” and have they no comeback on poor leadership and foolish orders? (Never mind that I missed the oath sworn by parents.) So there should be no redress for incompetent generals like Custer. But Hitchens does’t like actual soldiers; his legions are the mighty Keyboard Kommandoes, sod the ones who die.
I don’t remember Orwell sliming mothers, or writing sentences so convoluted they defeated his own understanding. Just because Hitchens has been fooled once shouldn’t mean that he thinks “you can’t get fooled again.” As Abraham Lincoln observed, “You can fool some of the people all of the time.” In Hitchens’ world, lies, such as the WMD claim, may serve a higher truth; fooling oneself and other people is a moral cause. Tell that to the marines.
Update: I’ve revised this post to clear up solecisms and mis-spellings, and added one link for clarity. (The original, drearily similar, post is here.
These 700 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:42pm GMT Permanent link.
Shoot-To-Kill-To-Protect »
This word was hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:11pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 18 August 2005
Clear In His Ideals And Will Fight To Lead America To A Better Place »
Christopher Walken for President in 2008.
Let the sliming begin. (Walken already has views on healthcare: stem cell research anyway.)
If he writes:
I am a huge supporter of the military. I have always thought of them as our guardians, and when our guardians are making less than the poverty line, and children are suffering because their parents decided to join the military, well, I get very upset. I feel that instead of sending billions to the Pentagon’s pet projects, it should go to the troops.
Can Christopher Hitchens be far behind? “Bah! Humbug, sir, sanctimonious humbug! They volunteered to live below the poverty line in constant danger! And I, sir, spit on them and their relatives. Let me assure you, Bush is not on holiday, or he will return from thence soon! And then your and the media’s lies that he is in Crawford, Texas will be exposed! You say he is in his ranch, and I say he is in his office. Come back later in the year, and we will see which of us is right!”
Why oh why can’t George W. Bush just be President for ever? (Don’t worry about those fainthearts in the West Wing, George. That guy in Captain’s Quarters and Chris Muir will always support you. Pray that neither of them ever runs for a bus.)
These 161 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:44pm GMT Permanent link.
Something Has Shifted »
Via Tim Worstall, the best Jean Charles de Menezes post I’ve come across so far (by Chris who blogs at Optimus in Omnis). Parts of this will repay watching closely. (I admit that not all the facts are out, and this will almost certainly develop in an unexpected way.)
Seemingly, the only sane officer on the Metropolitan police force (a man named only as Hotel 3) was bowled over by a wave of ineptitude and stubbornness that a dead terrorist was better than an alive terrorist. Hotel 3 asked to take de Menezes into custody. Quietly. Without bullets. His higher-ups refused, seemingly wanting this confrontation where they could bring down one of the supposed lynchpins of the attempted attacks on the capital a day earlier. With this public arrest, people would be reassured: we would be winning this war on terrorists. We would, as the leaders of our police force and our nation, along with various truly good-meaning souls who have become entwined with deceitful characters, not be afraid.
…
Hotel 3, shot down on his request, then had to fall back and allow de Menezes on the tube. It is at this point that the lies the British public have been spun over the past three weeks really start to snowball.
… Hotel 3 pointed out de Menezes (in what would be the single mistake he made) before trying to detain the Brazilian, who had left his seat in the confusion of four armed police officers storming the train he was on.
Hotel 3 managed to pin de Menezes down on his seat, to the point that he could not move. This was seemingly not enough for some trigger-happy SO19 officers, who decided to unload eight bullets into his head and chest, and three into the seat behind him, from what one eyewitness referenced in the leaked report as “twelve inches.” Hotel 3 narrowly dodged the hail of bullets, which left de Menezes stone cold dead.
Chris continues:
Just three weeks ago, I was a staunch supporter of the Metropolitan Police and their shoot to kill policy, under the pretence that the suspect had been acting suspiciously, was wearing what looked like a bomb belt and had evaded police officers. I still am a supporter of the policy, as long as the person in question actually does any of those three things. If, as happened here, none of those suspicions were raised, and if, as happened here, any kind of identification was forgone, I am totally against it.
That’s largely how I feel, except I’d add that when I wrote about this story (here), I thought the SO19 officers could be forgiven for not recognising the member of the surveillance team (who was presumably in plain clothes), so even though he’s given evidence including “I grabbed the male in the denim jacket by wrapping both my arms around his torso, pinning his arms to his side” they may have believed he was a member of the public, and possibly in danger. Now that it seems that they knew who he was, I can see no reason for the execution of de Menezes. I’ve intervened in fights before, and chased a thief. Until this week, I thought that if I saw a policeman in pursuit of someone, I might help. If it means being shot at, I’ll pass, thanks.
I wonder how Eve Garrard is getting on with the deep clash, at some subterranean level, of great tectonic plates in our moral thinking. (I’ve no idea what it means, but it sounds deep, subterranean even, quite possibly both.) But she was right. (By accident, perhaps: John Band would approve.)
In the issues raised by Alibhai-Brown’s insistence that … worry about the danger from the police to young … men must take precedence over worries about the danger to all of us from suicide bombers, we can see the moral substratum supporting our ways of thinking about social relations beginning to shift.
Something has shifted.
These 245 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:37pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 19 August 2005
Simply Speaking English With A German Accent Will Do »
Via Mike Power, 20 40 Things That Only Happen In Movies. Including:
- You will survive any battle in any war UNLESS you show someone a picture of your sweetheart back home.
- No matter how savagely a spaceship is attacked, its internal gravity system is never damaged.
- The ventilation system of any building is the perfect hiding place. Nobody will ever think of looking for you in there and you can travel to any other part of the building undetected.
- All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red digital displays so you know exactly when they are going to explode.
And my favourite:
- Should you wish to pass yourself off as a German officer, it will not be necessary to learn to speak German. Simply speaking English with a German accent will do. Similarly, when they are alone, all German soldiers prefer to speak English to each other.
This applies even if the “German officers” are non-human aliens on another planet …
… No I never understood how that worked.
Image from Laura Goodwin’s Silly Star Trek Obsession which explains the plot thus:
Kirk undresses Spock and himself and they dress up like Nazis, but Spock can’t pass. They get caught, stripped, whipped, and thrown into a cell with only one bunk! Oh my gosh, somebody isn’t going to get much sleep tonight! Later, there is an incredible scene where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are all literally in a closet together dressed as Nazis!
Are you sinking that my accent is not convincink?
These 199 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:05am GMT Permanent link.
Galaxies »
Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, NGC 1 and NGC 2 (larger image).
“[E]stimated distances [are] over 150 million light-years for NGC 1 (top) and about twice that for NGC 2.”
150 million light-years! If they had powerful enough telescopes (if telescopes could be powerful enough) and if they looked at our galaxy right now (if there is a “right now") and our planet, they’d see the first birds, flowers, and mammals. (Which reminds me that the best book chapter title ever is “How dinosaurs invented flowers” in Robert Bakker’s splendid The Dinosaur Heresies.) There were cool dinosaurs like Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, and Apatosaurus (which I still call “Brontosaurus").
But that is assuming there can be a “they” in NGC 1. Half the time this planet has been cool was without life of any kind. Most life on this world is either vegetation or beetles. We came along very late. My brain tells me there may be no living things among the 200+ billion stars. And even if there is, it may be microbial, certainly not intelligent.
Dead. And I balk at that. Perhaps in NGC 1, there is an Empire and a Rebellion and Princesses and Wookies. But probably not. There’s probably nothing. So much nothing is hard to imagine, isn’t it?
And what do dying galaxies sound like?
These 219 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:10am GMT Permanent link.
Lyrical Doonesbury »
“What, like we grew up in the golden age of lyrics?”
Well, I did.
Trouble in transit, cut through the roadblock,
we blended with the crowd
We got computers, we’re tapping pohne lines,
I know that ain’t allowed
We dress like students, we dress like housewives,
or in a suit and a tie
I changed my hairstyle, so many times now,
I don’t know what I look like!
You make me shiver, I feel so tender,
we make a pretty good team
Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks?
They won’t help me survive
My chest is aching, and it burns like a furnace,
the burning keeps me alive
Talking Heads, Life During Wartime. Not that the housewife look worked for me. (iTunes just throws the craziest things up sometimes.)
These 36 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:37am GMT Permanent link.
When First We Practice To Deceive »
Telegraph: There was no cover-up, says Met chief.
“I and everyone who advised me believed that the man we had shot was a suicide bomber and therefore one of the four people we were looking for, or someone else. It seemed utterly vital that the counter-terrorism investigation took precedence, the forensics, the ballistics,” Sir Ian said. “I’m not defending myself against making a mistake or being wrong, but I am defending myself against an allegation that I did not act in good faith and I reject utterly the concept of a cover-up. If you were going to define how to do a cover-up you would not write a letter to the permanent secretary of the Home Office, copying it to the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority and the chairman of the IPCC.”
But this isn’t the question. I don’t have (much of) a problem with the police fatally shooting an armed suspect who is resisting arrest. But that can’t possibly have applied to Jean Charles de Menezes. And while the bombers on the 7th of July killed 52 people, the bombers on the 21st killed no one. Even if de Menezes had been the man they thought he was, they could still have arrested him (as they in fact did with the real bombers).
Yesterday the IPCC said: “The Metropolitan Police Service initially resisted us taking on the investigation but we overcame that. It was an important victory for our independence. This dispute has caused delay in us taking over the investigation but we have worked hard to recover the lost ground.”
Like any criminal investigation, IPCC cases can go either way. Anyone who argues against IPCC involvement on the grounds that investigation itself is a sign of guilt, and the police have nothing to answer for anyway, gives away more than they know.
These 132 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:26am GMT Permanent link.
Mo Mowlam »
Earth, receive an honoured guest
Auden
BBC: ’Remarkable’ Mo Mowlam dies at 55 (with lots of links). Mowlan and Cook were among the reasons that voting Labour in May 1997 felt so good. Now they’re gone, and apart from the sadness I feel at the deaths, I’m left with a taste much like you get on finding half a maggot in an apple.
These 57 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:57am GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 20 August 2005
Mealy Mouthing Mo »
Jamie says, a tad harshly, IMO (though I can’t think of anything to prove him wrong) of Mo Mowlam:
Her entire political career seemed to be based on having a fully formed personality.
I don’t think Ms Mowlam deserved the treatment she receives this morning in the Guardian. They come not as single spies, these assassins, these vipers, but in twos.
Back then, politicians had to be over 50, male and mealy-mouthed. Not young, female and straight-talking.
“Back then” was when Ms Mowlam first entered Parliament — 1987. That year Clare Short, the straight-talking opposition front-bencher and opponent of page 3, was 41. She is not a man. Edwina Currie (oops! note spelling mistake in URL) was also 41, on the government benches, and talking straight. That may have been the year of the advert with David Jason, in a transparently “Del Boy” social climber role, planning to send his daughter, Edwina, to public school, so she was well enough known outside Westminster. She, too, is not a man. The Prime Minister was The Right Honourable Margaret Hilda Thatcher. I’m not a fan of her myself, but if there’s a straight-talking quotient, Mrs Thatcher would score highly, I’m sure. She was over 50 in 1987, but she took over her party’s leadership in her 51st year, which is good going.
What does Harriet Harman mean by “had to be” — and what does she have against being “over 50"? She’s an unspinnable 55 herself.
Mo was “substance” in politics as well as having a unique style. What is often forgotten is that she was a seriously clever and hardworking woman. She was a strongly committed Labour “moderniser” in the days before it was fashionable, believing it necessary to make Labour electable. But though unashamedly New Labour she kept close links with the traditional base of the party. It trusted her because she was a moderniser, not to denigrate Labour’s past but to build the party for the future. Her commitment was to progressive politics. Labour party members could see that and loved her for it. She was always a star at annual conference.
This rather makes Jamie’s point, I’m afraid. Plenty of talk about substance and commitment; no pointing to examples of same.
Few can remember who was the secretary of state for Northern Ireland before Mo was appointed.
Few can remember what your job is Harriet, what’s your point? (Patrick Mayhew, BTW.)
Alan Clark the late MP — an unlikely admirer — said when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour that he hoped he could find even a fraction of the courage Mo displayed.
Why is Alan Clark an unlikely admirer? He wrote nice things about Clare Short too. He may have been a sexist pig in Labour parlance, but he was a great admirer of women.
The Guardian subed doesn’t make the other memorial piece any softer by placing
Mo should have left Northern Ireland the moment the ink was dry
in a huge eye-catching pullquote. She’s not even buried; now is not a good time for her successor to go about upbraiding her career. (Oh, and I hate the phrase “the ink was dry” — do they still use leaky fountain pens?)
Tributes to politicians, often maligned when in office, invariably become glowing encomia when the moment arrives …
This is a glowing encomium?
But her disappointment resulted from a misjudgment of her own interests. Health permitting, she could have capitalised on her well-earned popularity to become a leading and influential member of the cabinet.
No, I wouldn’t want Peter Mandelson telling me what my interests are either.
When, after the signing of the Good Friday agreement in 1998, it would have been right for a fresh face to take forward its implementation, she refused the prime minister’s offer to move her on. A year later, with the peace process stagnating and her own high reputation affected by this, she flatly rejected the prime minister’s suggestion that she run for mayor of London. She seem slighted by the offer. Actually — again — it would have been the (re)making of her, just as going to Northern Ireland had been. She was a talented, individualistic politician who defied conventional moulds and, as London’s first directly elected mayor, she would have enjoyed ruling in her own domain.
Once again, Mr Mandelson seems to know the late Ms Mowlam’s feelings better than she did herself.
Is this a slip?
By 1989 she was quickly moving to the front of the stage. Neil Kinnock, in a move prompted by Labour’s chief press officer, Colin Byrne, and recommended by me, appointed her as Bryan Gould’s No 2 in the European election campaign of that year. …
She showed her gratitude to me in an unusual way with the gift of a compact TV and radio set that sat by my bedside throughout my time in Hartlepool. I can think of few other politicians making such a kind gesture. She was subsequently rewarded with promotion as the frontbench spokesman on the City in Gordon Brown’s trade and industry team.
“Rewarded” — for what? I hope he means for her performance as “Bryan Gould’s No 2” but there’s a more cynical interpretation.
And when will the Guardian either get decent cartoonists or learn to make to with graphic-free pages? There’s a vile scrawl of Mowlam which makes her look demented illustrating these pieces. Ralph Steadman was kinder to Nixon, who at least deserved it. There’s a passable likeness of Melvyn Bragg in the books section, but for some reason it claims to depict John Irving.
These 461 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:52pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 21 August 2005
Roundup Of The Britblogs »
Tim Worstall has posted his weekly selection aka the Britblog Roundup. Good stuff as always, but I particularly recommend the Pub Philosopher on Mo Mowlam, which I only read after posting on her myself (and I’m still seething that the Guardian let Peter Mandelson stroke his Teflon ego in what ought to be an appreciation of the deceased). Chris Lightfoot on Oliver Kamm is good too.
And because I spent too much of last night clearing referrer spam out of another blog, Wedding Photographers Northampton UK.
These 86 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:24pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 22 August 2005
Can't Sing, Can't Play, Can Draw A Piano »
BBC: ’Piano Man’ flies back to Germany. I watched the report on Channel 4 news, which said that he’d attempted to commit suicide — hence the lack of identification or labels on his clothes.
It was reported that health and social workers said they were “stunned” when he proceeded to give them a virtuoso performance.
However, newspaper reports now suggest he was only able to play one note continuously.
Hilarious, really. (Not the suicidally depressed part, but the media coverage of nothing, and the invention of his talent.)
These 53 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:01pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 23 August 2005
What Is It Like To Be A Dog That Has Been Run Over? »
Ogged finds one of my favourite ever Wittgenstein stories.
It was the nineteen-thirties, and Wittgenstein had gone to the hospital to visit a friend whose tonsils had just been taken out. She croaked to Wittgenstein, “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” Wittgenstein (the friend recalled) was disgusted to hear her say this. “You don"t know what a dog that has been run over feels like,” he snapped.
Speaking of Wittgenstein, he also provides the answer to Chris Brooke’s problem. Why do (some) students begin essays with dictionary definitions of “key conceptual terms"? The sensible answer, it seems to me, is that there is nothing wrong with this in a first draft, but the final essay should throw away this crutch and define the concepts in the writer’s own words (heavily referenced, of course). This step must be saved for a later draft because the student’s understanding of the terms may mature during the writing of the first. The OED definition of the word “world” is much weaker than:
1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
These 110 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:42am GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 24 August 2005
Yet Another False Dichotomy »
Tim Worstall replies robustly to Gandalf. Tim’s capable of looking after himself (and makes some valid points), so I’ll take a different tack.
The London Times has run front page stories attacking the police on Menezes for at least the past 10 days, ignoring the other 52 dead. Now it’s accusing the cops of wiping CCTV coverage of the killing.
…
Their story is unverifiable innuendo, and chasing that hare merely adds more load on the cops — who, in case you’ve forgotten, are trying to prevent the next slaughter.
But this story isn’t “unverifiable innuendo” — the Telegraph reports on the Tube shooting inquiry.
But confusion continued over the existence of closed circuit television footage of Mr de Menezes’s last moments. Mr Cummins did not clarify whether the “comprehensive handover package” received by the IPCC from the Metropolitan Police regarding the shooting included CCTV film taken from numerous cameras at Stockwell Tube station where Mr de Menezes died.
A police report has claimed that there was no footage from the platform or the train, but workers at the station have suggested that most, if not all, of the cameras were working.
This is either a false claim or a true one, and over the next few months someone will work out a test to decide which. (Would all the cameras have stopped working? There are four platforms in Stockwell station — two for each line, Northern and Victoria — did they all take no footage? Are camera faults common on the Underground? Is footage relayed to another station, to the London Transport Police for example?)
Gandalf then quotes the sister of a victim of the London bombings.
A Romanian immigrant, Mrs Gorodi condemned the hysterical nature of the criticism directed at Sir Ian Blair and asked why the victims of the atrocity appeared to have been forgotten.
She is waiting to receive some of her sister’s body parts and said she had barely begun to grieve.
“I just think it is shocking,” she said. “The whole nation has forgotten what happened a few weeks ago. Fifty-two people died in that bombing but they have been totally forgotten. Everybody is hysterical about finding someone to pay for that poor young man who died.
I can understand that to anyone connected to the victims, the world carrying on as normal must seem hideously insensitive, and talking about anything else may appear as ignorance. But the victims haven’t been forgotten: the Guardian has been particularly good in this respect, publishing tributes to all 52. But we know who killed Mrs Gorodi’s sister — it was “Jermaine Lindsay, the 19-year-old Jamaican-born suicide bomber.” And he’s dead.
The killing of Jean Charles de Menezes was not an “accident” it may have been a mistake, but it’s a culpable one. I belief Gandalf’s illustration is a misleading one.
But accidents happen all the time, particularly when people have to make split-second life-or-death judgment calls when mentally and physically stressed. And they’re nobody’s fault!
Blaming people for every accident makes the world less safe, because rather then avoid future accidents (which they cannot), people move away from tasks that risk accidents.
I can’t speak for Tim, but I’m not blaming the police. I think, from what I know so far, that the surveillance officer who restrained Mr de Menezes did the right thing. If he had been a likely bomber, they could have taken him into custody and asked him some questions. Even if you believe in judicial killing (which I don’t), I fail to see how the shooting of an armed man advances the cause of preventing the next attack. As it happens, the bombers were aprehended without shots being fired; I’m sure the officers who performed those arrests found them stressful, but they got them right.
As the American politician Carl Schurz said in another context:
My country right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong to be set right!
If true, I consider it deeply regrettable that ’Marxists have hijacked family’s quest for justice’ (though it’s not too late to fix that), but Tim and the Times are supporting the police, and the law, in the best possible way.
These 381 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:21am GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 25 August 2005
Both Like And Unlike This World Of Ours »
Once you get past the first couple of paragraphs of Tim Radford’s Come out, come out, wherever you are on “the absent alien” it seems well researched. There’s a logical fallacy I think between the ending of one paragraph and the start of the next here.
… wistful wondering about other worlds began a long time ago: before Copernicus, Galileo and others had firmly established that Earth was a planet, just like Venus or Mars.
Epicurus wrote to Herodotus in 300BC proposing there could be “infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours” inhabited by “living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world”.
The Greeks knew the Earth was roughly spherical and in space and going round the sun, so I don’t know what more they needed to establish that the “Earth was a planet, just like Venus or Mars.”
Kepler thought it highly probable that Jupiter was inhabited and Christian Wolff in the 18th century even worked out what a Jovian might look like. If bodily size was proportional to the eye, and the square of the diameter of the pupil was inversely proportional to the intensity of available light, and if Jupiter was 26/5 times further from the sun it would get 5/26 times the available light so, bingo, a Jovian would need to be 1,400ft tall.
Which may have inspired Voltaire’s Micromegas.
The astronomers Herschel and Bode proposed that even the sun might be inhabited, Benjamin Franklin wondered about the constitutions of the people who lived on Mercury, so close to the sun; and a Scottish clergyman called Thomas Dick in 1828 calculated there might be 2.4bn inhabited worlds within the visible universe. In 1837, he went further. He reasoned that the population density of England at 280 souls per square mile meant 53 billion lived on Venus and more than 8 trillion people might dwell on the rings of Saturn.
I’m sceptical about Thomas Dick, because I don’t think there are anything like 2.4bn (or a tenth of that if he was assuming that every star has roughly eight planets) stars visible to 19th century telescopes. I hope the research is better than the accompanying Seth Shostak’s guide to fictional aliens which says:
These pesky aliens from Star Trek do only one thing: make more Tribbles. How this happens is discreetly obscure, as are all anatomical features of these furry lumps. But modesty aside, reproduction — whatever the dirty, nasty mechanics — eventually relies on food to bulk up the offspring. What is it that Tribbles eat? Air?
When the U.S.S. Enterprise receives a top-priority order to protect a shipment of quadrotriticale grain on Deep Space Station K-7, Kirk is irritated to be guarding a shipment of “wheat.” But the shipment is meant for famine-struck Sherman’s Planet, and Klingons are taking shore leave on the space station. Adding to Kirk’s irritation is Federation Undersecretary for Agriculture, Nilz Baris, and his pesty assistant, Arne Darvin, who inform Kirk that Starfleet Command is afraid the Klingons may try to steal the grain.
Another problem arises when a space trader, Cyrano Jones, gives Uhura a purring ball of fluff known as a tribble. Charmed by the creature, Uhura takes it back to the Enterprise. However, as McCoy soon learns, tribbles are born pregnant and the more they eat … and they eat constantly … the more they multiply. Soon the starship is overrun by the furry creatures.
Kirk soon finds that the bins that were once full of the precious quadrotriticale are now full of dead tribbles. The grain has been poisoned by a Klingon agent disguised as the Undersecretary’s assistant, Darvin. His true identity is exposed when Kirk discovers that tribbles don’t like Klingons (and vice-versa) and squeak whenever they’re in near proximity. The Klingons leave the space station and Scotty rids the Enterprise of the tribbles by beaming them aboard the departing Klingon ship where, as he tells Kirk, ” … they’ll be no tribble at all.”
These 143 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:20pm GMT Permanent link.
Lied To By The Main Stream Media -- Again! »
I haven’t been to the US for nearly three years now, and the last time was to Chicago, which, I learn from Harry’s Place, is one of “America’s most liberal cities in 2005.” (The “America’s most liberal cities in 2005” list is pretty much “all the places worth seeing” with the unaccountable exceptions of Austin, TX, and Portland, OR, both fine liberal cities; well Austin is a bit funny, but its heart is in the right place.) Chicago may not be typical — as Gene says of the conurbations George Galloway plans to visit, “they’re hardly a representative sample of America.” I met Paula Radcliffe as well, but she’s not a typical American, or even an American. The BBC says: US people getting fatter, fast.
Americans are getting fatter at a rate never seen before, a report shows.
In the past year, the adult obesity rate rose in 48 of America’s states, and nationally from 23.7% to 24.5%, Trust for America’s Health found.
In 10 states, over a quarter of adults are now obese, despite campaigns alerting people to the dangers of over-eating.
Mississippi, famous for its calorific mud pie, ranked the highest, followed by Alabama and West Virginia.
Aren’t those the States famous for duelling banjos and inbreeding? Roger L Simon could well be on to something when he said, “One could get very upset about this if Hollywood movies meant anywhere near what they once did to the zeitgeist. Fortunately they don’t.” You see, I thought our transatlantic cousins all looked like these people. Clearly I have been misled by Hollywood. I blame liberals. And terrorists. And liberals working with terrorists.
These 199 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:35pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 26 August 2005
Fox News -- Bearing False Witness »
“False Witness” sounds like a great cable TV show idea, no? Members of the public and professional journalists Murdoch hacks make shit up and broadcast it. I gotta market this right away! Uh-oh. Fox News.
In what Fox News officials concede was a mistake, John Loftus, a former U.S. prosecutor, gave out the address Aug. 7, saying it was the home of a Middle Eastern man, Iyad K. Hilal, who was the leader of a terrorist group with ties to those responsible for the July 7 bombings in London.
Hilal, whom Loftus identified by name during the broadcast, moved out of the house about three years ago. But the consequences were immediate for the Voricks [the present owners].
Satellite photos of the house and directions to the residence were posted online. The Voricks told police, who arranged for the content to be taken down. Someone even removed the street sign where the Voricks live to provide some protection.
Oh, it was a “mistake.” (I could get sick of that word.)
The Voricks said they had made several unsuccessful attempts to contact Fox News and Loftus by telephone and e-mail. They want a public apology and correction.
Both have issued apologies — Fox in a one-line statement to the Los Angeles Times and Loftus in an e-mail to the family — after being contacted by the newspaper. The Voricks say they have yet to see or hear a correction.
“John Loftus has been reprimanded for his careless error, and we sincerely apologize to the family,” said Fox spokeswoman Irena Brigante.
Loftus also apologized and told The Times last week that “mistakes happen.”
“I’m terribly sorry about that. I had no idea. That was the best information we had at the time,” he said.
Loftus said he gave out the address to help local police, and insisted that Hilal, a Garden Grove grocery store owner, was a terrorist.
“I thought it might help police in that area now that we have positively identified a terrorist living in [Orange County],” he said.
So Loftus thought he might help the police — not in the usual way by going to the station and telling them what he knew. No, he’s a Fox journalist, so he just broadcasts unchecked facts. (The police seem to be ahead of the knuckle-dragging broadcaster anyway.) I mean, if you really had the whereabouts of a terrorist, would you broadcast that information on television, letting all their accomplices know, and prejudicing the putative court case? Of course you would, if you had a single-figure IQ and worked for Fox.
Via Gary Farber, who “strongly urge[s] lawsuit.”
Was Scott Adams thinking of Fox News here?
These 153 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:42am GMT Permanent link.
Are You Having A Laugh? »
This is, like, totally impossible.
Patrick: “You’re not married, you don’t have a girlfriend and you’ve never watched Star Trek?”
Andy: “No.”
Patrick: “Good Lord.”
Couldn’t happen. Not in a million years. “Patrick” is Patrick Stewart.
These 16 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 27 August 2005
Not Very Many People Have Made The Connection »
Andrew at The Sharpener tried to write a serious post on abortion. Over in Wingnutland, there’s an unbelievable post on the same subject. Or not. Who knows what the hell Believe it or not: abortion causes illegal immigration is about?
In 1973, the year that the notorious Roe v Wade decision became the law of the land, American women legally murdered 615,831 innocent unborn children. The grisly toll rose year by year, until by 1982 the number of annual abortions had doubled, reaching almost 1,304,000. Of course, these are the documented deaths, they fail to include the additional thousands of babies murdered outside the medical realm.
According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, the first eleven years of legal abortions in America killed about 11.9 million babies (from 1973 to 1983). If those aborted children had lived and grown to adulthood, their median age today would be 30.5 years old.
Now, the number of estimated illegal immigrants in the U.S.A. ranges from 10.3 million to 15 million; so add these two numbers together and divide by two, and you get about 12.5 million as a pretty close guesstimate of how many illegal workers, mostly Mexican, are now in America.
Is this mere coincidence, or is there some direct correlation between those two numbers, 11.9 million and 12.5 million? I think it is both. Without question, at least part of the reason why we have illegal immigrants crossing our borders in droves is because there is a need for more cheap laborers in the fields and factories of America. It is a simple economic proposition: increased demand creates its own supply.
There is so much wrong with this, I feel like a starving donkey between two haystacks, not knowing whyichway to turn. Didn’t the US import cheap labour (in the form of slaves, whose transport someone else had to pay for, never mind the poor immigrants) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? “Is this mere coincidence, or is there some direct correlation between those two numbers, 11.9 million and 12.5 million? I think it is both.” Logically impossible, old son, coincidence and correlation are mutually exclusive. “It is a simple economic proposition: increased demand creates its own supply.” That’s why famines in Africa (in historical ones in Europe and even the States) pass so quickly. “Food!” they cry, and lo! there was a supply of food. Because economics is just big magic. Via Sadly, No.
Elsewhere, Chris Dillow says, “I lack two talents necessary for any columnist: the ability to pander to people’s prejudices and to repeat myself week after week.” Young master Tabor certainly knows how to pander to anti-abortion prejudices and fear of Mexicans. I’m sure he can repeat himself too. Problem is, the laddie is nuts.
OMG, at the bottom of the page it says that he ran for Congress. I’m an atheist, but maybe there is a devil. And
He has his Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Robertson School of Government at Regent University.
That would be here. Go to Faculty & Staff and you can’t miss: Emotional Intelligence (EQ-i) Certification Workshop. Er, that’s the main uni, the Robertson School of Government has a micro-site, where an almumna says,
Jesus Christ and the Bible are honored at the Robertson School of Government. The professors here not only share wisdom, but they dare to teach absolute truth. Their office doors and hearts are open to the students. They live out what they teach, and they inspire us with a holy fear of God so that we can go out from here and do the same.
I so want a PhD in absolute truth (after I’ve had a good puke). Do you doubt me? It’s absolutely true! BTW, the sun is hot. Is that true? Absolutely? Though not compared to, say, Sirius.
These 323 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:12am GMT Permanent link.
True Wits »
Mark Holland is impressed by the Times’ Did you know that comedians need a high IQ?.
Cerebral comedians often hide their intelligence behind a comedy persona, she said. Al Murray, who graduated from Cambridge University with one of the highest marks in his subject, has become a high profile comedian with his character of the pub landlord. “It is less threatening,” Haynes said. “People are more likely to like Al Murray, pub landlord, than Alastair Murray, history graduate.”
This IQ theory may explain why there are fewer good jokes in a year of Chris Muir than in one strip of Dinosaur Comics. (And I say that in all modesty as the only blogger I know of to slip the best ‘man walks into a bar’ joke ever into a blog post.)
In the Telegraph, Craig Brown compares Graham Greene to Frankie Howerd. No prizes for guessing which was the better craftsman.
Howerd was a shy, tormented man (friends estimate he had as many as 24 different psychoanalysts over the course of his life), who tortured himself with fear every time he walked out on stage. He once said that the great paradox of showbusiness is that the most insecure people are drawn to one of the most insecure professions in the world. “In my case,” he added, “I was a nervous wreck with tremendous determination.” He was homosexual, and wished he wasn’t. Terrified lest his secret be made public, and turn him into an object of scorn, he managed to sublimate these fears and transform them into the stuff of comedy.
This put him in the odd position of being able to produce uproarious laughter from his audiences by imploring them to take him more seriously ("No. Don’t laugh. No. Don’t, please. You’ll make trouble. I beg of you. Don’t laugh.").
Which rather reminds me of the genius of the recently-finished Extras. I’m sure I’ve said things like, “Room for a small one? Oooh! I see you’ve started without me, wouldn’t be the first time!” The sad thing is, I’ve said it in relationships, which may explain why I’m not married, don’t have a girlfriend and watch Star Trek.
I can keep this up all night.
Don’t laugh, it’s rude.
No, don’t.
These 160 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 29 August 2005
Katrina And The Waves »
I rather liked the Southern Comfort ad with the people trapped in a New Orleans bar during a hurricane and making merry, until a policeman enters and tells them the storm’s over and they’re all “Awwwww” then “WTF” and go back to partying. Looks like we won’t see that one again.
I like NO. I had the good fortune to be there (unplanned) over Mardi Gras, and it’s a joyous place filled with young Americans acting like the British. (Probably the influence of the French and Catholic origins of the city, rather than the square Protestantism so much of the US is heir to.)
Obsidian Wings is the place to go for blog updates. Commenter (and member — is that the right word?) Slartibartfast says:
New Orleans has all the makings of the biggest storm disaster in this country in the last few decades, if not the last century. This storm makes Ivan look like a minor squall. The damage a hurricane does is roughly proportional to the difference between its central pressure and standard pressure (1000 millibars); Ivan was 946 millibars, Andrew was 922 millibars; Katrina is, right now, 904 millibars. Camille was 909 millibars. I hope everyone has gotten the hell out of dodge.
I’ve been discussing going to assist with the cleanup and recovery afterward, with the wife. You never know what’s going to happen until after it does, but this…there’s no way it’s going to change course, and even if it slows down a bit it’ll still push water all over NO. There’ll be trees on houses everywhere.
To paraphrase his first paragraph, the difference between the central pressure of Hurricane Ivan and standard pressure in millibars was 1000 - 946 = 54. For Hurricane Andrew, it was 78 millibars, and at the time of writing, for Hurricane Katrina, it was 96 millibars.
Well, all we can do is hope that the hype is worse than the high water.
Astronomy picture of the day: Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico.
What good tidings with the Westboro Baptist Church wrench from this? They delighted in 2000 dead Swedes. (It’s win-win for these bastards. Katrina destroys New Orleans: God takes his vengeance. Hurricane does not destroy New Orleans: God shows mercy.) Are they sick enough to take pleasure in this? Yes. (WARNING: extremely offensive. I can’t imagine anyone, of any political or religious persuasion, who would not be offended. And England is not an island you ignorant cretins.)
These 274 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:53am GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 30 August 2005
The Things They Say »
As Matthew Turner likes to quote the letters pages of the right-wing press, here’s a letter I like from the Sunday Telegraph:
Surely, George W Bush is the disproof of his own recent assertion that mankind is the result of “Intelligent Design"?
John Haynes, Welford, Northants
Well at least George W Bush is good at some things. Unlike Mark Steyn in today’s Telegraph. Will Steyn ever make sense?
If memory serves, the last British hurricane warning was the one delivered — or, rather, non-delivered — by Michael Fish on the BBC: “A lady’s just called in to say there’s a hurricane. Hur-hur,” chuckled Michael dismissively, shortly before it swept in and destroyed all seven oaks in Sevenoaks.
This opening paragraph has nothing to do with what follows, except indulge Mr Steyn’s major paraphilia — knocking the British. Fifty quid says Steyn does not remember the original broadcast before the hurricane; he may have seen one of the repeats on some “It’ll be Alright on the Night” type show. (Fish also didn’t say that; here’s a video.) The “hurricane” (or cyclone) blew down six of the seven oaks.
He then pads out his piece still further with snippets of the warning from the National Weather Service, and then from Associated Press’s rewriting of the same. Then we have the famous Mark Steyn in-depth research.
I switched on the television …
Gosh Mark, you must be working yourself into an early grave …
… to find one expert speculating on the impact of a vast increase in West Nile mosquitoes on those Gulf Coasters who are HIV-positive. And, if that seems a fairly unlikely combination of factors, how about the scene at the New Orleans Superdome? The last refuge of those trapped in the city, the sports stadium was expected to have its lower two stories flooded, while up above huddled 40,000 people with little light, no functioning bathrooms, no air conditioning and temperatures up in the nineties.
If the expert’s “combination of factors” is “unlikely” how about … Huh? I don’t follow the logic.
By the time you read this, it may all have come to pass, … But … it occurred to me that these days Macmillan’s bit of alleged political wisdom has never been more wrong. Asked what he feared most, Macmillan replied: “Events, dear boy, events.” But today in the developed world we don’t “fear” events; quite the opposite. It’s not that we exactly look forward to them per se, but that we relish the opportunity to rise to the occasion.
Macmillan wasn’t asked “what he feared most” — he was asked what can “most easily steer a government off course.” (See fellow Tory Michael Fabricant.) The question meant “which events” and the answer meant “any events.” So the “feared most” is pure projection on Steyn’s part. Of course, as Macmillan was in government, the events happened to him; the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina is about events happening to other people. Do “we relish the opportunity to rise to the occasion"? (Not if we live in New York according to fellow wing nut Ann Coulter.) What rising has Steyn ever done?
The real problems are the non-events — the things that aren’t sudden but gradual, the frog-in-the-slow-boiling-water stuff. It’s not just that we don’t notice the slow-boil threats, but that, insofar as we do take the long view, we obsess on utterly fictional dangers.
Steyn doesn’t elaborate what these “non-events” are, but I guess the shorter Steyn is, as always, “over there, terrorists!”
In the film [The Day After Tommorow], the so-called “money shot” of New York’s harbour frozen solid looked to me like a typical February day at the Saguenay fjord in my beloved Quebec. No doubt if you’re a commodities broker or an assistant choreographer, it’d be a bit of a bummer, but you’d be surprised at how quickly you pick up the basics of ice-fishing and snow insulation.
Steyn: fuggedaboudit, you’ll survive. You’ll be much much poorer, but no great loss. Greater love hath no bearded little troll for Quebec than he live in the Beltway. I’m sure they’re very grateful and send him money to holiday somewhere warm.
Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond’s other curious choices of “societies”.
Well, “society” only means Western civilisation. Nothing else counts. Mayans weren’t white, and didn’t need low-brow Canadian film critics, so they don’t count as a “society.”
Conversely, Diamond’s book [Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,] is a huge bestseller with those who see it as a warning on the perils of excessive consumerism — even though, in fact, America returns land to the wilderness every year, and my own town is far more forested than it was in either 1905 or 1805.
Which town? Are we still in frozen Quebec? This isn’t a refutation of Diamond at all; it’s reluctant praise for environmentalists as far as I can tell. I’m not sure how a town can be “forested” assuming that the word means anything. Towns are one thing, and forests are another.
For example, as further refutation of the Diamond thesis, in 1981 America had 315 oil refineries in operation; today, it has 144.
Again, this doesn’t refute Diamond, not even the travesty which Steyn attributes to him.
As the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina demonstrate, mankind has got very good at responding to acts of God. We’re not so hot at responding to the acts (political and cultural) of man.
Here he’s completely lost me. The second sentence could be Diamond’s own position (that societies fall through their own folly); it could be Macmillan’s. How have “the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina” demonstrated that we’re good at responding to acts of God? Go to New Orleans, Mark, and tell them.
These 479 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:52pm GMT Permanent link.
Losted »
Nick Barlow has posted on how awful Lost is, so I’m glad that I’d didn’t write something in the same vein earlier.
Of course, one has to forgive the writers a little for constantly resorting to flashback to give each episode the semblance of a plot. After all, it’s hard to find stories to tell amongst a disparate group of strangers stranded without supplies on a mysterious island in the middle of nowhere while surrounded by strange creatures and evidence that there were, and maybe still are, other people lost there as well. Yes, there are no stories to be told there at all, in the same way that Star Trek fans used to welcome episodes set entirely on the holodeck because there were just no stories left to tell about exploring the infinite vastness of space.
I’ve seen the first four episodes, and so far, as Nick says, the stories are much more concerned with what happened prior to the crash. The only reason for doing this is to open up the script writing to unconnected freelancers. As long as the characters don’t interact, what writer B puts in episode 8 won’t contradict what writer A had in episode 5.
The Sunday Telegraph ran a strange piece on Lost a couple of weekends ago: The man who discovered ‘Lost’ - and found himself out of a job. “Discovered” not “wrote” or “directed” note. The man is suit. Who gives a fuck?
The instant that Lloyd Braun read the 25th and final page of the script outline, the ABC Television Group chairman turned to one of his assistants and bragged excitedly: “This, my friend, is ER.”
Revelation 1: a suit can read. Revelation 2: he thinks he has friends. Already my credibility is past breaking point, He “bragged"? WTF? Who can have a conversation with these fools? Hey, nice outfit, Armani right, like all the other execs wear? (I suppose the less-dumb ones would come back with, “At least I wash.")
While he, swept along on a tidal wave of enthusiasm, commissioned JJ Abrams, the award-winning scriptwriter of the hit series Alias …
Yes, Alias known for starring Jennifer Garner and er… watched by millions of men because it stars Jennifer Garner and er … And he commissions the writer! Brilliant, Holmes!
[Lloyd Braun] envisaged the show as a cross between Cast Away, the 2000 film starring Tom Hanks, and Survivor, the reality television show set on a desert island. He immediately thought of Abrams. When Braun telephoned Abrams, the writer was initially taken aback. “I immediately told him: ‘It can’t be a normal island. If I do it, it will be a weird, borderline sci-fi show.’ He said he loved that,” said Abrams.
So, it’s like that film where Tom Hanks talks to a basketball and a TV show with voting. Of course. And the island is so not-normal, that all the interesting action takes place elsewhere. That’s freaky.
[Bob Iger deputy to Michael Eisner, the chairman and chief executive of Disney which owns ABC], insist[ed] that it would never work as a series, [and] saved the worst of his sarcasm for the fact that the writers still did not even know what the mysterious presence on the island was.
They don’t have to. It’s modular. It can be in any order. But here’s the kicker and some of what I was going to write.
Braun, according to the Los Angeles Times, said of the Abrams outline: “It’s the best piece of television I’ve ever read. I was out of my mind. I knew it would make noise that would be so big, so different, you couldn’t avoid it.”
Er yeah. In the pilot, the place crashes (with, as Charlie Brooker points out, survivors with ‘a dainty scratch here, a neat graze there, and absolutely no one with a whopping great shard of metal jutting from their eye’). And for some reason, three of the cast go back into the wreckage to loot the cockpit. While they’re there, the creepy English guy disappears. The slim brunette notices, after a bit, Hey, hunky guy with the scratches, where’s creepy English guy? Aaaaah! Aaaaah! Aaaah! he just come out of the toilet! I’m like soo scared.
You know in Jaws where there are the kids messing with the shark fin and the whole beach panics, and then it’s like “Whew!” And then … “Uh-uh Uh-uh Uh-uh Uh-hah … Could we have something similar here?
Slim brunette: “What were you doing in there, creepy English guy?” Creepy English guy looks embarrassed, ‘what did she want to watch? We’re all alone on this island and one of us is a pervert.’
And then the pilot wakes up. “Urghh,” says the pilot, before giving us some back story in dialogue which would have been better if it were just shown. Pilot to co-pilot: “Where did you learn to fly? The Mohammed Atta Aviation School? We’re a thousand miles off course.” Co-pilot: “No way dude, we cannot be a thousand miles off course.” Pilot: “Way dude, We are so lost, we’re a thousand miles off course.” Co-pilot: “How far, dude?” Nah, far better to have a dying pilot just tell us. Then comes the surprise, the pilot was wearing regular pilot gear, see, not a red shirt. And we’ve never seen any of the characters before and they didn’t beam down, so how are we to expect what happened next. THE MONSTER smashes through the glass (yeah right) reaches into the cabin and grabs the pilot! Wow! Good luck it was a guy who was dying and not in any of the advance publicity. Pervy brunette has to live. Creepy English guy has a SECRET about to be revealed.
Kurt Vonnegut has Eight rules for writing fiction. Number 3 is
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
What did the pilot want? Nothing — he was just a way of conveying the plot (and wouldn’t it have been more interesting if they didn’t know they were lost forever?). How, when there are people all over the beach did THE MONSTER pick him? Rather than a corpse in the exposed passenger cabin? Why hasn’t THE MONSTER eaten since? This is terrible writing. All exposition, no character revealing. If it were like Survivor some character could be picked off each week, but that would ruin the modularity (and if some country objected to an aspect of an episode, say the racist depiction of the Japanese, it would mean that they can’t just omit that one, because someone would be missing with no explanation).
Mind you, why haven’t we seen any more polar bears? When I saw that, I thought we were in for a latter day Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, with strange beasts and anthropophagi. Lost is not even imaginative enough to rip off Poe or Coleridge. Creepy English guy is a junkie. Who knew? With that accent he was either going to be on drugs or about to rob the diner with Honeybun.
And what happened to Braun?
Though tempted to return to television after his departure from ABC, he decided to ask his young children whether they would rather give up television or their computer. They told him the television. He accepted the job at Yahoo!.
At least that keeps him far away from the creatives. BTW, kid, wrong choice. Television is a bottleneck: you were only up against three other networks, and most of them are run by idiots like you. The interweb is open to everyone.
These 872 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:09pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 31 August 2005
Steyn Update »
I posted yesterday on Mark Steyn’s panglossian take on Hurricane Katrina. I may have been unfair. True, he found the most cataclysmic predictions he could, and sneered at them. True, the Telegraph today reports on Katrina’s tide of destruction:
“The devastation is greater than our worst fears,” said Kathleen Blanco, the Louisiana governor, with tears in her eyes. “It’s totally overwhelming.”
True, he said
Oh, to be sure, there are always folks who panic, or loot.
As if to say, “looters! in the US of A, are we such barbarians? (I don’t speak for liberals.)”
While the Telegraph said:
Looters roamed the streets. As they waded through hip-deep waters in the French Quarter to make off with jewellery, food and clothes, Denise Bollinger, a tourist from Philadelphia, said: “It’s downtown Baghdad. It’s insane.”
But he did make a couple of fair points, and I hope he follows them up in his many publications.
The real problems are the non-events - the things that aren’t sudden but gradual, the frog-in-the-slow-boiling-water stuff. …
So the real test of this hurricane is whether, after the event, there’s still the will to tackle the long-term questions.
He’s right there. The Herald Tribune reports on Hurricane Katrina’s real name.
The hurricane that struck Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.
Go for it, Mark.
These 101 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:33am GMT Permanent link.
There's Hope For The President Yet »
Gary Farber discovers that even chimps have culture. As Gary says:
It’s been a piece of folklore for $DEITY knows how many millenia that Man Is Above The Animals, not like them in many ways: we use tools, we have morals, we laugh, we learn, we have cultures, and various other claims have long been asserted as to our Unique and Exceptional place.
Then we discovered tool-using animals, chimpanzees using sticks to dig ants out of anthills. Guard dogs will savage intruders, but not the people they live with and know, which suggests their principles would fit in well in the West Bank or Belfast. There’s a paper called Do Dogs Laugh? (not online but published here); the title was suggested, IIRC, by Thomas Mann, who wrote of his dog laughing. It certainly seems to me that cats have a sense of humour: I’ve had several who think it’s enormously clever to jump into a chair just before someone sits on it. As the paper says, extracted here:
The one social condition necessary for a joke to be enjoyed is that … a dominant pattern of relations is challenged by another….
Animals know all about that. The New Scientist piece which Gary quotes starts with:
KILLER whales and chimpanzees both pass on “traditions” to other members of their group, according to two separate studies of feeding behaviour. The findings add to evidence that cultural learning is widespread among animals.
And concludes:
Primatologist Katie Slocombe of the University of St Andrews, UK, recorded the grunts made by chimps at nearby Edinburgh Zoo as they collected food at two feeders. One dispensed bread, considered a high-quality treat, and the other doled out apples, a much less sought-after snack.
Slocombe then played back the recordings and watched the reactions of a 6-year-old male named Liberius. The results were striking. After hearing a bread grunt, Liberius spent far more time searching around the bread feeder, while an apple grunt would send him hunting under the apple feeder. Slocombe presented the work at the US Animal Behavior Society meeting in Snowbird, Utah, this month.
This is the first convincing evidence of “referential communication” in chimps, says primatologist Amy Pollick of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
This disappoints me a little, as I was quite fond of the idea that the first languages were sign languages. (I think I read it first in Seeing Voices, but I can’t find my copy.) Part of the reason that idea caught on is because chimps don’t have the vocal chords for articulate speech but they can handle (heh, pun not intended) sign language. Other primates — Vervet monkeys are already knows to make vocalizations for substantive threats.
As for the culture part, and the passing on practices, Gary illustrates that with a quite different link in a later post: Cats in Sinks. Some, like this and this and this and this, show mother cats indoctrinating kittens in sink dwelling. Culture. Others, like this show two ostensibly adult cats sharing a sink which is too small for them so one cat is obliged to drape a leg over the other. Delicate readers may wish to skip this sort of thing.
These 292 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:12pm GMT Permanent link.
A Great Want Of Education »
I rarely agree with Laban Tall but he quotes a telling passage from Shuggy.
There is less social mobility in the UK than there was thirty tears ago. A large part of the problem is our school system that is run by people who think the school can’t help being a repository for the prevailing culture, rather than being what it is: an institution capable of setting and maintaining its own norms and values.
Laban goes on to say, ‘the faith school is the best at “setting and maintaining its own norms and values”. ’
I read Hilary Mantel’s Fludd a few days ago. I like this bit on page 71 of the Penguin edition. Fludd, who is assumed by everyone to be a priest, but isn’t, is talking to the nun who is headmistress of the local school about the resident priest.
“The man’s in a world of his own,” the nun continued. “More tea? Oh, he’s sound enough on doctrine, we all know that, toosound, the bishop says, an obstinate sort of man always on about the Church Fathers and talking over people’s heads. But his sermons can be mere gibberish. In the pulpit the other week he said the Pope was a Nazi. He said he was the head of the Mafia.”
“And the congregation?” [Fludd asked]… How did they take it?”
“Quietly,” said the nun, with a careless air. “They always do. They’ve a great want of education.”
And whose fault is that? Fludd muttered …
These 82 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Take The Unreadable And Make It Illegible »
JAY: I did, and the next day, when I woke up, I told myself you’re not going to read blogs all day. Because I’d been reading Daily Kos and the Agonist, Talking Points Memo, checking Google News twenty times a day.
BEN: I don’t read blogs so much.
Nicholson Baker, Checkpoint
Look at this one! It’s about donuts!
These 8 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:13pm GMT Permanent link.
ID Crisis »
There was an excellent piece on Robert Trivers in Saturday’s Guardian.
He thinks biology teaches us to be wary of the idea that any particular individual could be perfectly designed by evolution: “You’re always facing a new world to which you’re poorly adapted. So if you look at any given individual, and ask how the hell did [they] survive for 4.5bn years, then it is helpful to think of all these error-prone processes: sexual reproduction ensures that there is lots of variation in the population, and most of it will be less than optimal.”
His second big idea was parental investment. Parents and children would have differing genetic interests, he saw, because a parent would wish to spread its investment of energy and time over all its children, to guard against the possibility of any one of them dying, whereas any individual child would want more than the parent should optimally give. As a baby mammal, it is to your advantage to suckle for as long as possible, but your mother may leave more grandchildren if she weans you in favour of a younger sibling.
One mistake creationists and crypto-creationists (IDers) make is to assume that an organism is “perfectly adapted.” But this is merely Dr Pangloss brought up to date.
Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches …
ID is spreading here. It’s bad enough that religious nuts get in the way of decent health care. We expect that of the red state America. The Times of London has now caught the bug, publishing a pompous kook named Bryan Appleyard . We must teach the controversy.
These 85 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:23pm GMT Permanent link.
Hitchens' Modest Proposal »
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind
Mahatma Gandhi
Simon of This Leaden Pall posts on Christopher Hitchens. I wrote the following in the comments, but as I quite like it, I’ll reproduce it here.
The first sentence, apart from Hitchens’ tic of stirring the waters, so to speak, with unnecessary sub-clauses and other literary divagations, is less than Orwellian in its intent. Swift’s own Modest Proposal was neither modest, nor a serious proposal. It was, however, intended sarcastically. Hitchens appears to asserting than his own proposal is modest (or straightforward, or common sensical, or some such thing) and is “less than Swiftian” in being so. What “Swiftian” means in this context, he leaves to the reader. I doubt sarcastic is the intended interpretation, in which case he is using the word wrongly, and being a pompous arse to boot.
Last year I posted on Christopher Hitchens and quoted his then thoughts on Abu Ghraib:
Thugs and torturers, who are always on tap in limitless supply, do their work in the dark and, when caught, plead exceptional circumstances.
You may think Hitchens would know his Swift, but he doesn’t even know what “dark” means.
These 163 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:36pm GMT Permanent link.